Two candidates are facing off in the election for SGPS president.
Alexandra Giff, HealthSci ’25, MSc, ’27, and Tatyana Grandmaitre, ArtSci ’24, JD ’27, are running for president of the Society of Graduate and Professional Students (SGPS). The SGPS president serves as the primary spokesperson and liaison between the graduate and professional student body and the university administration. They are also responsible for representing the SGPS in the Senate, University Council, board of trustees, and other university governance bodies.
Alexandra Giff
Having been at Queen’s for the past six years, starting in undergraduate school and now pursuing a master’s degree with the Faculty of Translational Medicine, Giff feels ready to represent graduate students at the University.
“I wanted to run because I see and experience a lot of the challenges that graduate students experience,” Griff said. “So, I initially ran for student council master’s representative within my cohort, where I have been able to make a few changes, but I want to do that on a bigger scale.”
Beyond her position as student council master’s representative within her cohort, Giff is also a team leader with St. John’s Ambulance, which has taught her the importance of clear and transparent communication.
Her campaign platform is centered around three main pillars: increasing collaboration between faculties, helping students find suitable housing, and raising awareness of the SGPS and its services.
To encourage further collaboration between graduate faculties, Griff plans to engage more with each faculty student council. She also hopes to create a system where students can present their work and research to students from other faculties.
“My program does research round tables where students have the opportunity to present presentations, and then get feedback from other students,” Griff said. “I want to bring that to a bigger level, so that people from different faculties can attend, and you can get feedback you might not have heard within your program.”
While Griff understands she can’t necessarily lower housing prices for graduate students, she plans to make housing more accessible by creating an online accommodation listing service targeted towards graduate students.
“There is currently an accommodation listing service online, but it’s for all of Queen’s,” she said. “Graduate students have very different needs for housing compared to undergrad students. My plan is to make one that is specifically for graduate students.”
In order to increase awareness of and accessibility to SGPS services, Griff hopes to implement quarterly student surveys to check in with students, and what services they wish they had known about sooner.
“I’m going to make a commitment to address the top five or ten, depending on how feasible it is, services that students mention,” she said.
Tatyana Grandmaitre
Grandmaitre has also been at Queen’s for six years, first as an undergraduate student and now a JD candidate and is hoping to make a positive difference at the University in her last year.
She believes her experiencing working in orientation at the Student Experience Office, as the Queen’s Student Alumni Association president, as an HR manager, and as the Society 58 head manager has prepared her for the role.
“This means I’ve done event planning and project management and budgeting, skills which position me really well to lead a team and advocate for others,” Grandmaitre said.
Her campaign platform is based on three primary pillars: building mentorship programs, increasing personal and professional development opportunities, and encouraging student engagement with the SGPS.
Grandmaitre wants to expand mentorship programs between undergraduate and graduate students and build long-lasting rapport and relationships.
“When you’re in undergrad, you don’t really know how to get where you want to go, but you know you want to do grad school,” she said. “Now there’s someone there to support you. Graduate students also need that same support. As a grad student last year, I didn’t know how to get where I wanted to go, and mentorship was a big part of that.”
To increase opportunities for professional and personal development, Grandmaitre wants to make conferences and workshops that are currently only available or accessible to an individual faculty instead open to wider ranges of graduate students.
“[All faculties] have our own individual kind of opportunities for personal and professional development,” she said. “I would love to collaborate with all the faculties to build something that allows us to work in an interdisciplinary way.”
To encourage student engagement, Grandmaitre intends to plan collaborative events between the SGPS and student organizations and faculty societies in order to expose more people to the SGPS, thereby bolstering word-of-mouth marketing.
“I wouldn’t know about many things here at Queen’s if it wasn’t for people constantly collaborating,” she said. “Now [you] know that both of these resources exist. So I think focusing really heavily on collaborations and events will raise awareness [of the SGPS.]”
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The candidates debated their platforms at 6:00 p.m. on Jan. 26, with voting opening on Jan. 29 and closing on Jan. 30.
Tags
Elections 2026, SGPS elections, SGPS executive, SGPS president
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