The AMS isn’t just a club for Arts and Science students, says Alvin Tedjo, Team TPC’s presidential candidate.
“We’re trying to reach out to other faculty societies by saying, ‘Hey, we come from a diverse background.’”
Team TPC—Tedjo, Vice-President (University Affairs) candidate Liz Craig and Vice-President (Operations) candidate John Paterson—said their leadership and experience are their strengths. “Each of us brings leadership skills to the AMS and that’s really important when you’re trying to manage commissions, and services and things like that,” Craig said. Tedjo, ArtSci ’06, has vice-chaired the AMS Board of Directors and now works at Destinations as an assistant manager.
Craig is the COMPSA president and CompSci ’07. Paterson, Sci’06, is the AMS information technology officer. This is how they found each other: Team TPC decided to run at the beginning of this semester, Craig said, but each person had been considering running before then. “I’d been considering running since the summer, and unfortunately I hadn’t been able … to put together a group that, I thought, had the necessary skills that you really need to run the AMS properly,” Craig said. “I didn’t want to join a group that I thought wouldn’t do a great job.”
Tedjo said he did his own research to choose Paterson and Craig as running mates.
“I asked a lot of people what they thought about certain people,” Tedjo said. “[Paterson and Craig are] very strong candidates, very knowledgeable, very well-respected. I guess we just sat down and had a conversation.”
Tedjo said he first started thinking about running for AMS executive a couple of years ago, when he helped other people with their campaigns.
“I never really seriously considered it until I talked to Bill Howe who ran last year, and he was talking to me about what a great experience it was,” he said, adding that it wasn’t until the first week of January that the three of them decided to run together.
“[Liz] was really excited with the idea of running for exec and being able to take her experiences with COMPSA to an AMS-wide level and being able to make a difference on a wider scale,” he said. “[We thought], why not give it a try, because we think we could do a lot of good things.”
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One of the experiences Tedjo said he finds most valuable was his work on the AMS Board of Directors—as a member in his second year and vice-chair in his third. “That gave me a lot of experience on the services side, in terms of how the budgets are made, capital expenditures,” he said.
“So much happens at the board that affects the day-to-day running of things at the AMS.”
Tedjo is also no stranger to student elections. In 2004, he was campaign manager for Christopher Zabaneh’s unsuccessful run for rector, and in 2005, he was campaign manager for Bill Howe and Ian
Gillespie’s unsuccessful bid for ASUS executive.
Last year, Tedjo ran for ASUS executive with Melissa Grosser, ArtSci ’07, and finished third with 27 per cent of the vote. This year, in addition to his manager role at Destinations, Tedjo is a don in Victoria Hall. Michaela Ottenbreit, ArtSci ’10, said Tedjo has organized floor dinners and an intramural team for the wing.
“We had a water polo team that was really fun. We were called Alvin and the Chipmunks,” she said.
Destinations Manager Erin Bingley said Tedjo was instrumental n expanding charter services this year.
“He’s really been a strong force in the charter trip aspect. Originally at the beginning of the year, I just wanted to run Senators versus Leafs games, but he kind of expanded that,” Bingley said. “Alvin ran with the idea and we ended up doing one Blue Jays game, three hockey games, two basketball games and one NFL football [game].”
This year, Tedjo also hosted ashow on CFRC called Campus Confidential which ran Tuesdays at 4:30 until the end of January, when the show was cancelled. Tedjo said he felt he couldn’t put as much time into the show as he wanted. “I’ve gotten the interviews that I wanted to get,” he said. “There are a lot of things I could keep on doing, but I think as this semester came along, I started realizing I didn’t have as much time to put into the show as I wanted.”
When it came time for him to take a leave of absence for the campaign, he said, there were communication problems between himself and Sirena Liladrie, spoken word co-ordinator for CFRC. “I told them I was going on leave. We were trying to decide whether or not they were going to find someone to replace me for a couple weeks,” Tedjo said. “I was just trying to organize the campaign. I didn’t tell Sirena that I’d already found someone to do it, she assumed I hadn’t, so she thought it would probably just be easier to scrap it and put another show in its place, I think.” But Liladrie said the show was cancelled because of ongoing problems.
“[Tedjo] wasn’t putting the time and effort into his show; our programmers have a responsibility and we are accountable to our listeners,” she said. “It was a decision made by us. We expect a certain level of commitment and professionalism from our volunteers, and unfortunately Alvin did not provide that.
Liladrie said CFRC decided to cancel the show when Tedjo said he had to take a leave of absence and hadn’t found a replacement. “He told us he couldn’t continue while he was campaigning, that he would have to take a leave of absence, but it was still his responsibility to find someone to look after his show and he did not follow through with that,” she said.
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Paterson also has a long history with the AMS. For the last two years, he has been the information technology officer (ITO) for the AMS. His term was extended last year for another year.
Butch Marshall, application developer for the ITO, has worked with Paterson for two years.“He manages all of us. He’s one of those bosses who you canjoke around with, who you don’t have to be serious with, but he still makes you get stuff done,” he said. Paterson’s dedication also stands out, Marshall said “He’s on call pretty much 22 hours a day,” he said. “He’s slept in the office before.”
In 2005, Paterson ran for EngSoc president. He lost to Chris Zabaneh, but garnered 34 per cent of the number-one ranked votes.
Paterson has also served onQueen’s First Aid (QFA) since his first year and has served as a supervisor on the team for the last three.
Christina Slomka, ArtSci ’07, said Paterson has been very dedicated in his work at QFA.
“As a supervisor he’s required to work six hours a week, every week, but he always goes above and beyond that,” she said. Slomka said Paterson is a mentor to others and a valued part of the QFA team.
“He has a really good sense of humour, he tries to make all the newer members on the unit welcome, he takes the extra step of trying to make friends with all the members of the unit and find out what’s going on in their lives,” she said. “He’s definitely an asset to the team; he takes a leadership role and a lot of the younger members of QFA look up to him.”
Patrick McColm, ConEd ’07 and one of Paterson’s housemates, said they see Paterson so rarely they’ve turned it into a competition. “For a couple of weeks, we’re having a game with myself and my other roommates and the game is, ‘Who sees John the most?’ We put it on the board … if you see John, you get a point.”
McColm, who has known Paterson since 2005, said Paterson is usually at work but not many people know he likes to bake. “He’s actually quite the baker. He loves making bread … and he loves buying too much groceries,” he said, adding that Paterson takes his time when he’s doing his laundry. “It takes him, like, three days to do laundry. He’ll start it, put stuff in the washing machine, leaves it for a day and he’ll put things into the dryer and leave it there for a day … he gets dressed in the basement right out of the dryer,” he said.
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Liz Craig, vice-president (university affairs) candidate, has been working with COMPSA over the last two years and worked this year as COMPSA President. At COMPSA’s Frosh Week, Craig was a PC, a computer science frosh leader, and also the sponsorship director. Rosemary Regan, COMPSA vice-president, said she enjoys working with Craig. “Liz is pretty easygoing when you talk to her, and she’s always been open to a lot of ideas,” Regansaid. “She spearheaded a lot of ideas that were new for us.”
Regan said one example is what happened after the frosh boat cruise was cancelled. “Last year they cancelled [the] all-ages boat cruise, and she insisted on having an all-ages semi-formal,” Regan said. “She went after that herself to ensure our semi-formal was all-ages.” Regan said Liz’s number-one trait is her determination. “She has a lot of ideas and isn’t afraid to get after them herself,” Regan said. “If she gets it in her head that she needs something done, then she’ll go after it.”
Rector Johsa Manzanilla teamed up with Liz to address accessibility problems on campus this ear. “She had a student in computing who had difficulty accessing his classrooms and the computer
labs where he had to do his assignments,” Manzanilla said. “He had been trying to do things over the past couple of years and nothing had been done.” Manzanilla said several of the student’s concerns were fixed immediately once she and Craig contacted the administration andother concerns will be dealt with within the next few months. “She was extremely professional, very calm. It was dealt with faster than I could ever have imagined,” Manzanilla said. Amy Hwang, CompSci ’07 and COMPSA social affairs commissioner, said she couldn’t have asked for a better faculty representative. “She is sort of the package, just so organized and she’s so on top of anything, she knows everything that is going on; you couldn’t ask for a better leader,” Hwang said. “As part of [the COMPSA president’s] role she represents our little school of computing and it’s so apparent she’s such a big voice for us.”
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