From March 6th to 9th, OUSA hosted our spring General Assembly (GA) at University of Waterloo! Spring GA was bittersweet for many of our Steering Committee members as it marked the last time they led their delegation.
65 students came together, dissected policy, offered feedback, and engaged in critical discussion to approve two of the following OUSA’s policy papers.
- A Comprehensive Access Strategy
- Tech-enabled Learning
The conference opened up with a welcome by Elder Henry, David Devidi (VP Academic of University of Waterloo) as well as Mayor McCabe. Afterwards, we delved into the breakout sessions where delegates rotated through rooms, over two days, to provide feedback on the policy papers. Then, the authors integrated this feedback during rewrite sessions, engaging in the student-centred operations of OUSA’s work. To deepen delegate knowledge of tech-enabled learning, OUSA invited eCampus Ontario to give a presentation on Open Education Resources and provided insight on the current work being done to promote the implementation of OER as well as student advocacy’s role in that. Delegates also heard from Dr. Donna Strickland, Nobel prize winner and professor at University of Waterloo about the importance of STEM education for the development of technology.
With wonderful food each day, we ended each day of breakouts with a couple of fun socials for delegates to get to know other students across our member schools. We ran our first ever trivia night and it was a huge success! We split up each school and had nine cross-delegations trivia groups where delegates got to form new friendships and win some awesome UofW merch. You can see from this picture that the joy of knowing all the countries that start with the letter Q and Y was exhilarating. Trivia night was followed by a bowling night in town the next day.
While Kyle, the trivia host had all the right answers that were not up for debate, Plenary, on the last day of GA, was quite the opposite. The beauty of our student-centric policy papers comes down to our one student, one vote plenary floor. We had the honour of hosting Plenary in the stunning Senate Chamber, with Waterloo alum Stéphane Homade as the chair. The conference ended on a successful and sweet note with both policy papers passing – a massive congratulations to all our student authors!
After many goodbyes, hugs, and pictures, everyone headed their separate ways. While these weekends can be exhausting and stressful, it is also incredibly rewarding and reassuring that the work students do at GA matters.
A massive thank you goes out to Raj, David, Arya, and Kumar at WUSA for their help planning and organizing the conference! We look forward to hosting our student leaders at the annual Partners in Higher Education Dinner to finish off this year of strong student advocacy with a bang!