"Highlights" from the debate

A concatenation of my opening and closing remarks:

Good evening! My name is Will Matheson, and I’m running for VP External. I want to thank you for coming out tonight. I know how busy things are for each of you, and reading week isn’t coming quickly enough. You know that you’re not just sparing time to listen to us talk; you’re here because you want to make an informed decision.

I know from my years here and from my time on SRC that the SMUSA executives do a little bit of everything, and they’ve always been great, reliable, do-it-all types, and this is one reason I want to join their ranks. Our 2003-2004 VP External, Chris Richards, had to become an impromptu bus mechanic when our emergency brakes failed in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. It’s an always-on-call kind of job.

I will do more to accommodate the needs of off-campus students. There are so many web-enabled technologies available today that we’ve barely begun to leverage.

Lower tuition, lower tuition, lower tuition. We all agree on this. It bears repeating. The state of affairs is not only trying, but utterly absurd. Our very quality of education is suffering, both due to funding constraints and extreme trepidation with your program choices. Students of more progressive nations are going to get an entire generation ahead of us unless we do something now.

I’d like to see our co-op programs spread to eventually include every academic discipline in the university. I see no reason why this is not possible. Linguists could co-op at media agencies, history majors could find archival work, geographers could intern at cartographic and mapping companies, just to name a few. I’m not saying that these opportunities aren’t available already to students acting on their own initiative (as I did to get my Canada World Youth – NetCorps IT and Canada Corps e-governance internships), but for the price of admission to university, this kind of pervasive, prominent, easily accessible placement assistance is the least we can offer.

Thank you very much, and enjoy your evening!

* * *

Question from the moderator for the VP External candidates:

What was your most difficult academic, personal, or career experience, and how did you deal with it?

My most difficult career experience was when I was living in Ukraine last winter. You know how we have salted sidewalks and go places in cars? It was cold, and I fell down a lot!

I’ve been lucky; my experience at Saint Mary’s has been pretty smooth. My hardest time was the second semester of my frosh year when I was taking six courses, plus being in the play, plus SRC. I didn’t know where I was going, either. I slept in the computer lab a couple of times! But I got it done. Thanks!

I guess you had to be there; it was really off-the-cuff. It sounded better on the podium! =) Thanks for visiting!