“Cry for Help” Heard at Engineering Leadership Summit

“This is a cry for help” read the title of one of the motions presented at this year’s Engineering Leadership Summit (ELS), hosted here at Dalhousie University during the last weekend of February. While engineering society executives tend to create humorous and melodramatic motion titles to freshen up a stale debate, this title was not far from the underlying sentiment.

Moved by St. Francis Xavier University (StFX) and seconded by Cape Breton University (CBU), the “cry for help” was an appeal to create a new position on the  Atlantic Council of Engineering Students (ACES) executive: a “Small School Engagement Commissioner.” ELS is one of four annual conferences that falls under the purview of ACES. Typically attended by 100-150 delegates from across Atlantic Canada, the conference “serves as the second general meeting of the Atlantic Region” for ACES Executives and engineering society representatives (VP Externals) from member schools. It also serves as a “developmental opportunity” for delegates “who are involved or looking to get involved with engineering society leadership or other co-curricular initiatives.” 

Associate Universities (AUs) such as St. FX and CBU make up 50% of ACES membership, while the larger schools, Dalhousie University, University of New Brunswick (UNB) and Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), make up the rest. While the AUs only offer the Diploma of Engineering program, they feed students into the larger schools to complete their Bachelor degree and form an integral part of the Atlantic region’s engineering community. Still, they “have had a well-established challenge in attending, benefiting from and being involved in ACES events” due to the smaller scale of their budgeting and logistical capabilities. This year, at ELS, the Small School Engagement Commissioner position was created in response to this concern. An applicant will be chosen in May 2020, and the position will be ratified in the upcoming ACES Annual General Meeting this fall. The Sextant reached out to the movers of the motion to contextualize the need for this new position. 

President of the StFX engineering society, Evan Merrick, shared that small school engineering societies experience much higher turnover rates than large schools. While ACES exists to support all member schools, he expressed that without a dedicated support system for AUs, it is “difficult to know who to specifically approach on the ACES executive.” CBU VP External, Lauren Macleod, added that there is an intimidation factor and “when you’re from a small school and you have very little knowledge, it is difficult to reach out to the highest level of the executive.” CBU President Katie Trimm added that due to a disconnect in assumed knowledge and expertise, “The executives do not go into the necessary level of detail.” Indeed, for any young engineering student executive, there is a steep learning curve with regards to mastering internal operations, navigating student politics, and taking advantage of external relationships. This issue however has historically been more pronounced and more repetitive at smaller schools -- an understanding that the small schools themselves only reached this year when routine socializing at various conferences validated their respective insecurities and revealed a larger systemic issue.

The position is a fantastic opportunity for upper year engineering student leaders looking to upgrade their leadership portfolio and serve the Atlantic region at large. According to the motion, qualified applicants in their final year from any of the following schools will be given preference: Acadia, CBU, Dal AC, SMU, St. FX, and UNB St. John. However, anyone can apply. Students from all of the schools listed above, except for UNB St. John, feed into Dalhousie’s upper year engineering program, where they will specialize in their chosen discipline and complete their B.Eng. For AU students here on Sexton campus, this is an opportunity to give back to our diploma schools and help ease their transition into engineering at Dalhousie.

For more information, please refer to the ACES website at https://www.aces-caeg.com/