Three students are going head-to-head for the Engineering Society (EngSoc) Vice-President (Student Affairs) (VPSA) position.
Madeleine Provost and Panav Velpandi, both Sci ’27, and Saige Poliwoda, Sci ’28, have all put their hat in the ring for the 2025-26 EngSoc VPSA position. The VPSA is in charge of overseeing all activities that interact directly with the student body and managing six of the society’s directors. The candidates each sat down with The Journal to discuss their goals and ambitions for their VPSA campaigns.
Saige Poliwoda
Poliwoda currently serves as the EngSoc Director of Student Life, where she manages event planning and student experience, and engagement efforts. She attributed her organizational and time management skills to her ability to handle the role and expressed that the same skills would be utilized to make her a strong VPSA.
Her campaign is built around three pillars: equity, community strengthening and engagement.
Under equity, Poliwoda aims to restructure roles she considers underutilized, such as the Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Lead, and to strengthen their collaboration with other directors. She also hopes to better integrate the Director of Equity and Advocacy into the broader EngSoc community as a key resource and voice for other portfolios.
Poliwoda’s second pillar, community strengthening, focuses on streamlining hiring processes, particularly for the design team, as she emphasized the need for clear documentation and training aligned with EngSoc policy.
Engagement, which is her third pillar, stems from her time as Director of Student Life. She hopes to launch an EngSoc information fair separate from the O-Week fair to give students a second chance to learn about and engage with EngSoc during a less-busy time.
“I think giving first years more time to digest what they see will improve interaction with EngSoc […] especially for upper years, too.”
If elected, she also plans to host monthly expectation meetings with directors to ensure clear communication and collaboration, aiming to strengthen her team and make it easier for directors to meet their goals.
Madeleine Provost
Having worked for EngSoc her entire university career, most recently as its Speaker of Council and Chief Electoral Officer, Provost believes she has the knowledge and experience necessary to make positive change happen. She explained that she’s centering her campaign around pillars of engagement, support, and inclusivity.
Provost plans to increase engagement with EngSoc by simplifying its social media presence to ensure all events are findable in one place and fully launching the “You Are EngSoc” campaign, an idea she has already started working on this past year as Director of Human Resources.
“I want to make sure people understand that EngSoc isn’t just governance and niche administration things,” she said. “It’s huge services, like Clark Hall Pub, the Tea Room, Golden Words, and design teams. […] I want to start with managers and then work our way down and say you’re part of this community; we want you here.”
To ensure EngSoc is best supporting its students, Provost plans to create resource guides that will make it easier for clubs to access EngSoc services and understand ratification processes.
“We’ve a lot of resources in EngSoc that not a lot of people are aware of,” she said. “[…] Like people can get rebranded as a club for free, and we offer that, but people don’t necessarily understand that. So, I want to make resource guides for groups who are struggling.”
In terms of inclusivity, Provost hopes to not only create better land acknowledgements, but to promote Indigeneity beyond just land acknowledgements by platforming other Truth and Reconciliation efforts. She also plans on encouraging the equity team to more regularly check-in with clubs and to create more long-term plans for the SVPR role.
Panav Velpandi
Over the past three years, Velpandi has held eleven different roles within EngSoc and now wants to take on the role of VPSA. Velpandi’s three primary goals are fixing EngSoc’s relationship with its affiliated groups, bolstering transparency within the society, and improving internal policies and governance.
To better support and advocate for EngSoc-affiliated organizations, Velpandi wants to host continuous round table discussions where design teams can voice their questions and concerns.
“If we actively try to fix our relationship with our design teams and play a role of a mediator with the design teams, we can put up a collective front within our faculty and advocate for the things we want, […] we’ll have much more bargaining power,” he said.
Velpandi also hopes to increase transparency within EngSoc by publicizing the society’s plans and expanding the IT team to create a centralized website for all design teams to share their events and accomplishments.
“I want to be able to show to the world that [EngSoc] is a live organization,” he said. “It’s a student government that’s actively working to improve itself every day and trying to support our community.”
Regarding internal EngSoc policy and governance, Velpandi plans on mandating training at the beginning of the year for all council members in order to ensure all members understand what is expected of them and to encourage decorum.
If elected, Velpandi also hopes to help design teams set up accounts with the University to hold donations and sponsorships, and to increase communication with alumni to garner such donations.
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The EngSoc Vice-President debates will be taking place on Jan. 20 at 7:00 p.m. in the Integrated Learning Centre Atrium, and the voting period will take place between Jan. 26 and 27.
Tags
Elections 2026, EngSoc, EngSoc elections, EngSoc VP (Student Affairs)
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