EUSS Report Card

Stephen Lam

Happy 5th birthday, ENSCquire! And to all the Canadian engineering students participating in the Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC), welcome to Simon Fraser University (SFU). Wow! A lot of things happened this semester and many are still going on. I must say that we are having a very exciting and interesting semester.

First of all, all 10 competitors we sent to Western Engineering Competition Conference (WECC) returned "safely" (alive but not necessarily unharmed!) on February 4. Three of our competition teams placed first or second in their categories and they will be facing all the challengers from various Canadian engineering schools. Congratulations and the best of luck to all of them. Second, the EUSS was given a very difficult problem: we had to decide who would be the recipient of the first EUSS Award. The award is given to an undergraduate student who has contributed positively and significantly to the general SFU engineering student body in the past year. Four very qualified students were nominated: Jason Krause, Garson Ho, Robert Trost and Mark Booere. It was a very tough decision: Jason Krause is the CEC chair, Garson Ho is the EUSS VP Event, Robert Trost is the EUSS 1st year representative and Mark Booere was the EUSS 1st year representative last year. Unfortunately, there is only one EUSS Award, and we were forced to select only one out of the four exceptional candidates. After much headache and hair-pulling, the EUSS and the director of the school Albert Leung have decided to recommend Jason Krause as the award recipient to the Senate Undergraduate Awards Adjudication Committee. Congratulations to Jason, and please keep up the good work.

On February 9th, the EUSS held the 7th annual Polar Plunge. It is an annual event that the entire school, including undergrads, grads, faculty and staff, participates in. Over 50 students, faculty, and staff were thrown into the frozen pond to raise money for the Variety Club. We broke our last year's record and raised a total of $2635. On Saturday, February 10th at 10:00pm, Garson and I presented the cheque on the Variety Club Show of Hearts Telethon. Everything went quite smoothly, but little funny things happened. First, one of the MC's asked people to pick up the phone and dial the number to pledge a donation, the MC said something like, "It is now Sunday night and you are sitting at home with nothing to do..." And when they announced for the first time the amount of donation the club had received, the number "8" on the board was up-side down. When we were on the stage, the MC said we raised money in an event called the "Polar Bear Plunge". She also confused us with some other school when she mentioned we cause a lot of trouble. And when she asked us how much we raised this year, she was still holding the microphone to herself and you could only hear Garson saying "20 dollars." But all in all, it was a pretty exciting and interesting night. And the best thing was that, once again this year, the students as a whole did something very worthwhile, something we are very proud of.

When I received the email from Doug Girling asking for ideas on "what are the 3 things about the school you are most proud of", the first one that came to my mind was the quality of the students. We have one of the highest entrance standards in Canada and the students we have in this school are intelligent, dedicated and hard working. On top of a heavy course load, students are still actively and enthusiastically involved in various EUSS activities and CEC. We only have about a total of 200 students in the undergraduate program, and approximately 120 of them on campus this semester, but I am always amazed by how much work gets done by our student volunteers.

Two other things are currently happening in our school: academic planning and undergraduate curriculum revision. Both committees need input from all the students, so if you would like to contribute your ideas, please contact the student representatives: Ted Wilson (academic planning), Erik Minty and Kiyoshi Kuroiwa (undergraduate curriculum revision), or any EUSS executives.

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