What have you accomplished this summer?

We have finally [finalized] the tenants we have in the second floor cafeteria. We also finished Gerts! The half-million dollar renovations are finally completed. We’re really happy that we could negotiate a new beer contract, and the food at Gerts was also something we worked on. It’s a really good selection; we tried our best to make sure it’s pretty decent and reasonably priced.

Orientation week took quite a big part of our time. There was approximately 12 months of planning; it was really time-consuming, not only for the six executives, but for all our full-time staff here over the summer. We’re really excited about how it turned out.

The other interesting thing we’ve been working on is changes to the General Assembly (GA). We have new requirements for how GAs will be run, with particular regard to online voting and online ratification of GA motions afterwards. We’ve been working hard to make sure that [GAs] still maintain some of the culture that they have possessed in the past. I’m really confident that [GAs] are going to be pretty different this year and I hope people are [encouraged] to come out and not [simply] vote online.

What are your long-term goals for the year?

Something I would like to continue this year is working on a stronger coalition between student faculty associations and the school associations as well. Projects always seem to happen [a certain] way, where you have SSMU doing overarching projects and faculties just doing projects within, but I think that we can bring everyone together a bit more and work closely on campus-wide projects even with the faculty associations.

We have a lot of outdoor space projects planned for this year, in particular focusing on winter life outside. The goal is to get people outside, to take a break from studying because winter is a low point in terms of mental health.

How do you envision your role on the Board of Governors?

I’ve been finding out over the summer about what it means to be on a board in general, not necessarily McGill’s. My role is interesting —technically, I’m not the SSMU rep to the board of governors and it’s unprofessional to bring the SSMU opinion to the table. I’m supposed to bring Josh Redel’s opinion as a student to the board. So how do you play that? I envision myself being tough with how they move forward. It’s great that [the governors] are there because they have experience with different industries and, theoretically, with educational institutions, but I’m there because I’m currently attending an educational institution. So I see my role as tempering their very corporate view of an educational institution.