What have you accomplished this summer?

Organizing frosh. We took a step forward significantly toward the integrated orientation model, in the sense that it was the first year it was truly a cooperative working relationship, not only between all the faculties and SSMU, but also with the First Year Office and Student Services. The first month or so, we spent a lot of time renegotiating our beer contract. That took a long time, but now we have Sleeman on campus.

We’re also looking into making the Listserv more integrative. We’re looking to use Mail Chimp, which is currently used by the Management Undergraduate Society — it’s great because you get diagnostics, so you can see how many people actually read it and whether or not it’s a total waste of time. So, we’ll do a test run and see how people respond to that, and if that doesn’t work, we can find other ways, maybe even having a video news update or something like that.

We’re really trying to make the social media more interactive this year, integrating the Facebook and Twitter accounts so that it’s something we can pre-manage, and is more of something that people actually want to follow because we’ll have constant updates. So that should really start to become apparent around mid-September.

What are your long-term goals for the year?

I want to make my portfolio about more than the usual events. For example, for the end-of-year concert, we’re looking to do a two to three day SSMU music festival, and have one or two larger acts, but also showcase a lot of McGill and Montreal talent.

I also want to do a lot of smaller things that build McGill as a community. Next week I’m starting some movies in the park, since the one we had during Frosh week was really well received. It’s not something that takes an outstanding amount of effort, but it’s something people really appreciate. And then hopefully trying to bring back a couple of smaller things like the apple picking, and a trip to Mac Campus, so that there’s something to do almost every week.

What lessons from frosh planning will impact the way you run other events this year?

Definitely the new openness towards having an all-age event every single night of frosh. The numbers for the beer tent this year show a record low in consumption, which I think shows that having all these alternative activities is a good thing. Frosh also really established a lot of camaraderie between the faculties and with SSMU. This year, there was a lot more cooperation, and that’s going to help everyone move forward a lot. Hopefully everyone keeps working together because all of the faculties have something unique that they do, and to have other faculties participate in that would be great.