CompE Club 2018 Elections
Voted has ended and the results are in! See your new 2018 senior executive team below.
2018 Senior Executive Team
President: Shally Banh and Petar Cvijovic
VP External: Amir Shukayev
VP Internal: Navras Kamal and Thomas Tetz
VP Social: Erik Lewis
VP Finance: Ishaat Chowdhury
VP Hackathon: Nathan Doraty
VP All the Things: Jessica Prieto
Congratulations to our new executive team! The raw election results can be found here.
President
Shally Banh and Petar Cvijovic
Petar's Platform
- Preserve integrity of club atmosphere, create a space that people want to get involved in.
- Get Juniors more involved through a sense of accountability, complete overhaul of Junior exec positions. Some positions will be merged, voting will happen among senior execs in the coming academic year. (Disjoint in levels of responsibility, too many of some position, i.e stock rep)
- More interaction between Juniors and Seniors, clear expectations from Seniors about what Juniors should be doing
- Opportunities for Juniors to get more involved via Senior execs
- For fall AGM, make it clear that involvement needs to be fueled by a want to contribute and take part, not just for padding resumes, etc
- Push for more club organized events, focus on “meet and greet” type events for earlier in the year, more involved events later in the year
Shally's Platform
- Have more accountability from juniors and seniors
- Restructure the format of how compE meetings are run so we get more junior input from the meetings
- More community engagement have more interactions between the computer engineering/comp sci community and the club (i.e more events involving the community)
VP External
Danish Dua and Ahmed El-Gohary
Danish's Platform
Hey guys, I'm Danish and I'm running for CompE club VP External 2018-19. I love being a CompE and the fact that we as CompEs have an opportunity to define how people are gonna live their lives. And locally, how we are defining and 'disrupting' Edmonton's tech community and culture. So as a VP external for compE club, what I wanna achieve is to carry on what CompE club's amazing team has been doing so far; connecting the community with organizing events such as HackED and Hack Time and at the same time bringing us closer to the industry with events like Meet a computer engineer.
So here are the main things I wanna achieve this year to make the next few years in Computer engineering better for everyone:
- Continue organizing and promoting CompE club Hackathons, Hack Time and any events that help us as a community grow and get stronger
- Maintain the clubs relationship with amazing organizations like Startup Edmonton and promote everything they have been doing so far for our Edmonton's tech community and contribute to their goals and ideas
- Advocate for more independently structured CompE programs. I really don't like the idea of a fixed curriculum which you have to follow and would love access to more electives and at the same time fewer EE courses
- Promote external participation in CompE events and slack channels. I would love to have the club more open to anyone in CompE rather than just the executive team so we could actually have a stronger community and enhance the interaction outside class. I feel like the amount of interaction within the discipline is a bit lacking and would love to change that
These are some of the things I wanna do this year so if you relate to any of them, join me in doing something about it .
Ahmed's Platform
Push the University of Alberta towards being more Computer Engineering oriented, this is mainly by ensuring the coop coordinators network with more software companies, to ensure more employment opportunities for Computer Engineers as the interest in Computer Engineering is increasing every year. Also by trying to remove the mandated co-op resumes that put University of Alberta students at a serious disadvantage compared to students applying to other Universities.
Amir Shukayev
My goal next year will be to host a lot of employment and networking sessions with local companies and companies from different cities. Now that the CompE program is growing very fast we have a better chance of attracting employers to hire from the UofA.
VP Internal
Navras Kamal and Thomas Tetz
Navras's Platform
My name is Navras Kamal and I am a second year Computer Nano Engineering Coop student. I have been a part of the CompE club for the past year as the Marketing Rep and have been involved in many of the events throughout, including the Hackathons and GEER Week. From this, and with my past experience in film, graphic design and advertising I will be able to use the weekly newsletter to better promote the various events hosted and sponsored by the club. In addition, I will have an understanding of where resources such as the funding from the EUEF should be allocated, and can effectively scout and obtain the venues we need for our events and meetings.
Overall my experience both in and outside of the club gives me an advantage in this position, making me the ideal candidate for VP Internal.
Thomas's Platform
Hi, I’m Thomas and I’m running for VP Internal. Next year I will be a 5th year software co-op.
CompE club has given me many fond memories throughout my degree even though it’s rare to find me in the club room. In 2016/2017 I was the 3rd year representative but then was away on a work term during elections for 2017/2018. Additional experience as a club executive comes from high school where I was the president of Brain Care Youth, a club for volunteering with brain injury survivors.
One of the responsibilities as VP Internal is the weekly newsletter. I already have exposure to the MailChimp emailing service from my involvement with Learning Beyond Borders so the transition should be relatively seamless.
Another responsibility is allocating upgrade funding alongside the faculty. Being a senior student means I have exposure to the majority of lab environments for my discipline and know the kinds of questions to ask peers to gauge their needs.
I believe that my previous experience both as a club executive and with the required technologies will allow me to excel in this position, and I hope that you vote for me to be the 2018/2019 VP Internal.
VP Social
Erik Lewis
VP Finance
Ishaat Chowdhury
Hello, my name is Ishaat. I was VP Finance for CompE Club in Fall 2017 and I hope to continue in my position next year so that I can use my experience to maintain and improve our clubs finances going into the future. As our hackathons grow bigger, I hope to continue finding more efficient ways for companies to pay for sponsorship in order to improve the hackathon experience for students.
AVP Hackathon
Danish Dua
I love Hackathons. Maybe it's because there's no other way you'll actually build something in 24 hours from scratch and show it to the world. Or maybe it's because you're not doing it alone, there are so many people doing it with you which just makes it a bit more special. Having participated in 3 hackathons so far, I wanna get more people to experience the feeling of actually being in one! And that's why I would love to be a part of the team organizing them and contribute to the hack culture here in Edmonton. So here are the main agendas in my platform:
- I really loved how the hackathon committee and everyone involved behind the scenes so far for HackED and HackEDBeta have managed to achieve so much growth in the last few years and would love to contribute to that in the coming years
- I would love to see us expand and get hackers from outside Edmonton. It's really important for us to realize that tech culture would need a more global rather than local outlook, and us reaching out to get more hackers from outside Alberta (maybe through travel reimbursements on a short scale) would promote the local tech community
These are some of the things I wanna achieve in the coming years!
Nathan Doraty
My name is Nathan Doraty and I am a 4th year Computer Engineering Student and a long time Computer Engineering Club member. Formally, I held the 2nd Year Representative position and VP Finance position for 2 terms. My goal in running for AVP Hackathon will be to use my past experience with the club to help grow our two largest events, HackED and HackED Beta to even larger sizes and provide more value for the students attending. I have been fortunate enough to participate in some of the largest and best run hackathon across Canada and the US, including Hack the North, nwHacks and the Facebook Global Hackathon. My goal is to take these experiences and use them to grow the club’s events to the scale and quality of these large-scale events with the assistance of the hackathon committee.
HackED Beta (Formally HackED Fall), is our fall hackathon which was founded in 2016. The goal of HackED Beta is to provide students with the opportunity to experiment with new technology alongside the help of industry mentors in a smaller scale event before HackED. To improve the event, I would like to attract more sponsors with API’s involved to help engage students and give them an ideal starting point. I would also like to clean up and distribute the judging rubric well ahead of time, for both judges and participants to help prevent confusion and uncertainty along with better overall communication before the event. Growing the event is also very important and getting the first-year engineering students and high school students involved is crucial. As with any good hackathon, I would also be looking into getting better free swag for the event.
HackED is the original long running Computer Engineering Club Hackathon. The goal of HackED is to provide students with the opportunity to learn and show off their technical capabilities to industry leaders and to their fellow students. My goal is to double the event in size and grow it to be Alberta’s largest hackathon. I want it to showcase the best student talent in Alberta. To achieve this, I would like to build up better technical infrastructure which includes items such as the website and other day of technical tools. By moving beyond a single static web page, it will help to improve registration, sign ins, event participation estimation (to better estimate budgets) and judging. This will also help to improve overall communication between the club and the events participants. As with HackED Beta, I want to further improve the judging rubric and make things clearer for both judges and participants while also looking into getting more/better swag. I also want to provide more value for sponsors by providing them with better access to student talent while also providing students with more learning and networking opportunities. To draw more students into attending HackED, we will be reaching out to other universities and high schools across Alberta and Western Canada to gather them for an exciting weekend.
Thank you for taking the time to read about my vision for future Computer Engineering Club Hackathons and I hope that you will consider electing me for the AVP Hackathon position within the Computer Engineering Club.
VP All the Things
Ryan Huard
Hi, I'm Ryan! I've been VP Social of Comp E club for the past 2 years and I was a year rep for a year before that. During my time as VP Social I've put a lot of effort into making sure students in all years of Comp E were welcomed into the club and aware of opportunities to connect with other students.
I will be graduating this year and I don't want to lose the connections I've made with other students, or end my goal of encouraging Comp E students to build strong networks with each other. I'm very sad that I'll be leaving my position as VP Social which was uniquely positioned to accomplish this, however I want to continue as VP All the Things to keep students connected with alumni for mentorship and networking opportunities.
I plan on organizing networking and social events between existing Comp E students and alumni to help students through the struggle that is computer engineering. I also plan to support the rest of the new Comp E exec in making Comp E club as great of an experience for you as it was for me!
Jessica Prieto
Hello everyone! I’m Jessica. A long-time member of the Computer Engineering Club, and President for two straight years.
I may be graduating this year, but I do not want to let my involvement with Computer Engineering Club stop there. This is why I am running for this position! I’m already getting sad with the thought that I am leaving the club very soon. Win or lose, I will continue guiding the future execs who has become a part of my undergrad family in my time with CompE club. I’ll help them continue the awesome work the club has done and also guide them to improve the club that I am leaving to them. As VP All the things, I also promise to do my best to participate in Geer Week events, visit the club often and hang out with everyone.
Also, I love CompE club! The FOMO is real!