Summer Kick Off
Colten Yamagishi - Tue May 29, 2012Hello readers, welcome to the first Students’ Union Executive blog post of the year!
My name is Colten Yamagishi, SU president for 2012 —2013. I am extremely excited to be kicking off the year and I hope that you are all enjoying the first bits of this incredible summer.
With each blog post I will tell you more about the latest SU initiatives, interesting student facts, how you can get involved, and pretty much whatever comes to my head at the time.
I would like to start by answering the most basic question…what does the SU do?
The Students’ Union is founded upon four pillars; Advocacy, Building, Businesses, and Services. Let me break these down a little further:
Advocacy: We represent the voice of students to the university and the government on issues spanning from tuition costs to food quality on campus. Our five executive members (President, VP Academic, VP Student Life, VP Operations and Finance, and VP External) sit on a combined total of over one hundred committees to ensure that your voice is always heard at the decision making table. We also support Faculty Associations, Residence Associations, and other student groups to help foster good governance and develop student leaders.
Building and Businesses: We run the basic operations of the Students’ Union Building (SUB) and ensure that it provides a comfortable space to meet a wide range of student needs, from providing delicious food to great entertainment. We have a number of spaces in SUB to meet the needs of our student groups, including the common lounge, the study area, the Alumni Room, and the silent lounge — commonly referred as the “nap room.” We operate a number of retail outlets including SUBmart, SUBtitles, SUBprint, and the Canada Post Outlet. We also manage a number of food services, including Juicy, Cram Dunk, L’Express & Catering, Dewey’s, and Room at the Top. Lastly, we facilitate a number of events from our venues including SUBstage, the Myer Horowitz Theatre, and the Dinwoodie Lounge. You can expect great shows here throughout the year!
Services: It would take me about 10 blogs to explain all of the amazing work that our services do, so for now I have elected to just list them here. You can check out each of our services’ profiles individually on our website. Our nine services include the following: Safewalk, Infolink, Student Group Services, the Centre for Student Development (they run Orientation, After-U, and more), SUSTAINSU, the Student Financial Aid and Information Centre, the Student Ombudservice, the Peer Support Centre, and the Health and Dental Plan (operated by studentcare.net/works). We also provide support to the Campus Food Bank.
An additional and extremely valuable service that we provide is all of the amazing events hosted by our Programming and Venues department. The P+V department works year round to put on huge events like Week of Welcome, Antifreeze, and the Campus Cup Dodgeball Tournament. Programming also hosts reoccurring events including movie nights and student concerts.
As you can see, the SU is an extremely lively organization with a lot going on year-round. Sound like a lot of work? You bet it is, but we have amazing staff and volunteers that continually go above and beyond and run these operations smoothly to serve us — the students.
I hope this introduction has been helpful! Please feel free to contact me at president@su.ualberta.ca if you have any questions, concerns, ideas, or just want to chat. You can look forward to frequent blog updates this year, and a return of the video blog in the near future.
Cheers!
-Colten Yamagishi
