After a year of serving as a senator-at-large in the UBC Vancouver Senate’s student caucus, fourth-year mining engineering student Jakob Gattinger is running for re-election to continue the work he’s already started and tackle the topics he didn’t get around to addressing last year.
His platform revolves less around buzzwords and more around specific goals that he hopes to achieve. For one, he plans to advocate for a long-overdue governance review of Senate that could reform its structure and culture in various ways.
“Senate in the past has done a governance review, believe it or not, once every twenty years, which I think is completely unacceptable,” he said. “I think it should be done much more often and involve external parties rather than senators undertaking a review of themselves for all intents and purposes.”
Another big goal that Gattinger has — one which he identified as his loftiest — is to reform exam schedules in a way that favours students. Two reforms he suggested were shortening exam periods and holding exams on Sundays, which could both open up extra days for a fall reading break and possibly even a longer winter break as well.
“Fall reading break has become a big topic point, but I think it goes deeper than that in what student workload looks like [and] how the exam period is structured. We have a very short winter break, which has not been as much of a topic of concern, but for a lot of students who come internationally, they’re travelling thousands of miles to maybe have nine or ten days off.”
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He’s also interested in re-examining UBC’s exam concession procedures, which organize how a students’ exam would be postponed in the case of conflicting responsibilities or unforeseen circumstances such as an illness.
“If students do need a concession, they shouldn’t feel like it’s a combative environment where they should have to go up against their faculty,” he said.
Gattinger is currently the chair of the agenda committee, which oversees the rules and procedures of the Senate as well as the agendas for Senate meetings. He hopes to continue holding this position, in which he plans to push for a governance review as soon as possible.
It was in the agenda committee that a recommendation for the recently-created ad hoc committee on academic equity and inclusion came about. Gattinger was elected to the committee — which aims to advance equity and diversity within the social, academic and institutional levels of the university — at the February 28 Senate meeting, and he hopes to join the committee again if he is re-elected.
“There were a number of recommendations that came primarily around the time when Stephen Toope was UBC president about how we can improve diversity and inclusion in the Senate in an academic sense — but those were never really been followed up on. So I see we now finally have the opportunity to do those, [and] students kind of drove the bus on making this happen.”