VP Academic Candidate: Siobhan Lacey

RF: What do you feel the responsibilities of the vice president academic are?

SL: It is about the internal profile of the school, advocacy for students academically. I saw a lot of students this year as Vice President for Residence Affairs struggling academically and I want to continue to advocate for students internally.

RF: How do you feel you are qualified for the job?

SL: My first year at StFX I was a community advisor, from the minute I got here I feel like I’ve been trying my best to help students, then I was a hall director then the Vice president of Residence Affairs. I want to try to make sure that students know that I am here to support them. I feel like I have lots of insight into the student experience, I have my own, but I also have all the residents that lived in my building or the students that came to my office this year. I was also able to hone my advocacy abilities this year, and learn how to network.

I’ve had to be in committees with my professors but who aren’t my professors in that moment, and I have had to navigate and balance being a student and working at the Union and I feel like I have done an excellent job of learning the ropes of student unionism. Also you can do a lot on an executive team if you are a part of it for two years rather than one. The way the union works we are setting things up for the year after us so it is rare to see the things we want to accomplish get done in our year. I am now very used to advocating for students in an executive board room and understanding all the roles internally and externally.

RF: What are your pillars/platforms?

SL: I have six pillars, the first being Open Educational Resources (OER’s) are educational material that can be freely and publicly shared, like textbooks or even buzzers. The goal is making sure they are available to all students. Affordability is a big issue, so this is a way to help that, this is something that someone at the Union is always working on.

Holistic view of education is my second pillar, how the life outside of the classroom is connected to life in the classroom. We need our faculty and staff to understand what students’ students are bringing into the classroom. Faculty can be very intimidating, so we need professors to be prepared to be receptive if a student comes to them and discloses a problem they are having. We also need to put more money into residences and meal hall to promote education, to get a dietitian, there are lots of initiatives, but the core idea is that students bring a lot more into the classroom than just their laptops or textbooks. They are bringing all their life experiences and we need to factor that in.

Next is the Co-Op program, currently our Co-Op program besides Schwartz is not good. For arts there only math and computer science co-ops and science is pretty limited as well. Acadia has a wonderful Co-Op program; we can look at theirs and try to implement it and match it to our location. I think it is very important for students to get job experience before going into the real world. We have service learning but there is no compensation for that which is a big issue when we are talking about affordability.

Study space is another pillar, I believe we need more study space during finals, its absolute chaos trying to get a table in the library. The new Mulroney building is beautiful but there isn’t that much study space. We need to work with the university to simply just open up classrooms, we don’t need to build more we have it, we just need to access it. There are many things we can do; we just need to do them. Compensation for Immersion learning is what I want to do, for nursing students, students in the forensic psych programming basically any student who has to go away for their education but has to do so out of their own pocket. I would like to find funding for students to get reimbursed for gas money or bus ticket, to increase affordability.

The last one is faculty and staff training, all of the HPs/VPs of houses have to go through all this training whether it be disclosure training or positive space training which is amazing and I fully stand by that but it is not required for the faculty or staff. I really want disclosure training for the professors because I get a lot of students coming to my office and are in a position where they have to disclose this very traumatic thing or get a zero on a missed assignment. The professor doesn’t have to walk these students through this process, but a part of disclosure training is being able to give the student the right resources and where to go from there.

RF: What’s the first thing you are going do when you get into office?

SL: I want to learn as much as I can as soon as I can, so I would go talk to some of the past Vice-President Academics and I know I can learn a lot from them. I am confident in what I know but I also realize there is still a lot for me to learn. I would start familiarizing myself with anything I may have missed. I would also read all the policies and by-laws I can find and understand how those policy’s and by-laws affect the real world. I would like to start networking as soon as possible to have those networks in place as soon as possible. I want to identify the things I need to work on, I am aware of my weaknesses and my strengths and there are things I can work on so I can get going and be as prepared as possible.