The only contender for the president of the Computing Students’ Association (COMPSA) hopes to make the society more visible on campus.
Elizabeth Lappin, CompSci ’14, said she isn’t overly confident about the election even if she has no competition.
“I still have to get a vote of confidence, so there’s still that,” she said.
Lappin said being part of a small faculty — there are only 240 undergraduate students — means there’s a lack of resources.
“It is very difficult to find extra help and resources outside of classes, since we are a small faculty. We need to ensure that these resources are still available despite our size.”
Lappin said one initiative she wants to launch is a peers-helping-peers program.
“We would talk to professors to see what specific areas students are struggling with or what assignments they need the most help with,” she said. “Then hopefully we could get upper-years to come out and help the younger students.”
Lappin added that she also plans to establish a resource library for computing students, where they could find basic computing information.
“The library would be located in our COMPSA office which is on the fourth floor of Goodwin Hall,” she said.
Lappin said the library would come at no cost to COMPSA.
“Students can volunteer to donate their books. Other students can come in and photocopy pages or take the books out on an hourly basis,” she said.
This year, a new website service was built to allow groups on campus to get help building websites.
“Right now the service is basically run through our project manager,” Lappin said.
She added that charging groups for the service is based on a case-by-case basis.
“I want to make sure that this is sustainable. The first year is critical to its success, so I want to see that this goes well.”
Lappin is currently COMPSA’s vice-president of university affairs.
“I want voters to consider that as students, we can’t change everything, but we can change something. Whether it is academically or socially, we can have an impact,” Lappin said.
Jennifer Andrea and Isabel McCarten will be running campaigns for the position of vice-president of academics, while Sahib Purba, Maggie Laidlaw and Diana Ma will be on the ballot for the positions of vice-president of university affairs, vice-president of operations and upper-year representative, respectively.
— With files from Savoula Stylianou
Voting will take place online from Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.
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