Federation of Students Elections

Hi,

My name is Iyinoluwa Aboyeji but many of you may recognise me as E Aboyeji, author of E is for Error, a weekly Imprint column about an array of issues including the University administration and student representation. After a long period of thoughtful and painful deliberation, I have decided to run for the position of student senator at large.

You might be wondering, especially if you know me very well, why are you running for this position? Well, first I must say that I do not intend this to be another resume-building activity. Neither am I necessarily running on some highly altruistic notion of service to the student body. I am running because I have skin in the game. I am running because like you all, I am an undergraduate student genuinely concerned about the fate of the undergraduate students in a system that consistently insists that he must pay more for less.

Three words define this campaign

You Deserve Better.

You deserve better when for the first time in history, you will be contributing the most to our school's operating budget. Yes, even more than the government.

You deserve better when your administration is at war with the small classes that are the most useful to while it spreads your money and resources to failing education experiments all over the world.

You deserve better when you spend 71.2% of your operating budget on salaries and benefits and have a faculty-student ratio of 26:1 while UBC spends 60% of its operating budget on the same and has a faculty-student ratio of 14:1.

You deserve better when co-op and professional development programs are organised around the idea that you should go away to create more space, so the school can over enrol or that you should do the jobs of today better, rather than innovate the jobs of tomorrow.

You deserve better than a system that forces you to pay for everybody else's research but your own.

We could go on and on about how much more this university owes you, its innovative, resourceful and brilliant undergraduate students but I guess that's what campaign platforms are for. So visit www.uwdeserves.com/issues to read our campaign platform, "What is Better?" to gain more perspective on the array of issues affecting you.

You deserve Better. E serves Better. Vote February 9-12 for what you deserve.

Thank you.

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji.

University of Waterloo '12

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji