Take heed oh newly elected leaders, here are three simple ideas that could be put into place immediately and would just as quickly have an enormously positive effect on the student body.
1. Do Stuff YOU Can Do, While You Lobby Other People To Do Other Stuff
I know you AMS types have an obsession with tuition fees and land use planning and rapid transit and other things that will never really effect any students at UBC right now (except perhaps for the SJC which tends to cultivate forty somethings who stick around for quite some time). I know that long term grand scale stuff is important to you. Fine. Do it. Lobby. Build the skytrain yourselves, if you want. Just make sure that's not all you're doing. You could immeasurably improve the student experience by making campus cooler with events and school-wide programming. Integrate the fraternities and sororities more into mainstream campus life, the way you find on many American campuses. The key to getting students engaged isn't some open forum on something boring is a dark little room in the SUB on a Tuesday night. Think big. Thin exciting. Think partay. While you wait for other, less reliable institutions to come through for you, do the things you can do independently to realize immediate success.
2. [Re]Watch all the great college movies ever made. THAT is what college should be like. Make it happen.
So this is pretty straight forward. Just be sure to repeat it regularly. Oh and public screenings, though not a substitute for private AMS ones, would be good too. In case you need some suggestions, the following are required watching: Animal House; Back to School; the Paper Chase; Revenge of the Nerds.
3. When you plan events, plan them for everybody.
The AMS shouldn't plan events for the AMS. The AMS should plan events for the students at large. It's not enough to have an event wherein a representative from each faculty does something cool on behalf of the thousands of students they represent. Make things happen that actually involve the majority of students. I know it's tough, but if you could do it once or twice a semester, it would dramatically change the character of the campus.
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