helmer.ca : my volunteer experience

Volunteerism

Since the second year of my undergraduate studies, I've volunteered a significant amount of my time to on-campus not-for-profit organizations. This page breifly describes my experience with each organization.

Senator, University of Waterloo

24 months from May 2002-April 2004

I was elected to UW's Senate just after the general student government elections in March 2002. I was the sole representative of undergraduate arts students from 1 May 2002 till 30 April 2004. As Senator, I was responsible for reading one agenda package and attending one meeting per month. Some of these agenda packages were more than 100 pages long.

When I started as a Senator, I met with university leaders to talk about their near-term goals. These meetings were very useful: not only did I meet university leaders and introduce myself, but I also learned what was important to other people involved in university governance.

I also created two mailing lists to improve communication between student senators and between student senators and their constituents. These mailing lists are available at http://helmer.ca/mailman/listinfo.

During my two-year term, I served on a few committees, including Finance and Honorary Degrees. This committee work was interesting. I was often the only undergraduate student at these committee meetings.

Overall, my time on Senate was very rewarding. I learned a lot about how University of Waterloo is governed and met very talented professors, administrators and students.

Director and councillor, Federation of Students, University of Waterloo

12 months from May 2003-April 2004

• Contributed to the successful resolution of an $11 million lawsuit by the federation against the university
• Identified significant problems with the operating budget and budgeting process of the whole organization
• Lead a committee that reported these problems to council
• Extensively revised policies and procedures

Director, writer, editor, The uwstudent.org Media Corporation

38 months from February 2001-April 2004

• Wrote tens of news stories about university and student government, co-op education and other issues
• Edited hundreds of news stories, submitted by several different writers
• Championed collaborative open-source software called PHPWiki
• Tweaked HTML templates for the content management software
• One of three directors of the not-for-profit corporation

President, Imprint Publications, Waterloo

11 months from June 2001-April 2002

• Chaired board of directors meetings and general meetings of members
• Chaired full-time staff hiring committees
• Reviewed the performance of three full-time staff
• Argued for a lower per student fee