Students’ Union president Dalmy Baez is not your run-of-the-mill dragon, stomping around and burninating the countryside. In fact, Baez has been doing her best to help the peasants — er, students — as much as she can this past year.
Baez started a lot of new initiatives for the SU this year. She worked on the Governance Review to make the SU more accountable to students and organized a leadership conference for active campus members, a new event she hopes will continue. The conference brought the SU closer to club executives, something she listed as a goal in her platform. Orientation was also a success with the SU regaining access to U of C 101 and working with clubs to get students involved.
Students had a lot of say at tuition consultation, where SU members held a two-day event to see what students wanted if tuition increased. Unfortunately, the recommendations didn’t play a very big part in the finished product. Baez said that if she could re-do the year, she would have given other officials more time to have their say before passing the end result on to administration.
Students’ opinions were also brushed aside when Campus Pro-Life set up their controversial display and lost their club status.
As president, Baez oversaw the other executives. She said herself, as have many others, that delegation was an issue at the beginning of her term. But as she had more time to work with her VPs, sharing the workload and making sure everyone was doing their bit got easier. You really can’t expect one person to burn all those villages.
Overall, Baez was faced with some very challenging situations, but managed to pull through with as much grace as any lumbering dragon should.