C/O Simranjeet Singh

Meet Simranjeet Singh, one of the candidates running to become president of MSU

Simranjeet Singh is a fourth-year biomedical discovery and commercialization student at McMaster. Currently, Singh is Associate Vice President of the McMaster Student Union: Services. He is currently running to become the next president of MSU.

Singh provided a platform of five fundamental foundations: student well-being, building a stronger community, environmental sustainability, creating a more equitable education, and supporting career development.

Student welfare

Singh emphasizes his commitment to student welfare.

He wants to increase collaboration between Student Wellness Center and various student groups around campus, including MSU. To facilitate this, Singh proposes the creation of a Student Welfare Center Advisory Committee to serve as a direct liaison between the SWC and the leaders of various student bodies. With this, he wants to increase the number of support groups and staff at SWC allowing more students to access the service. Singh also hopes to expand prosperous week, a service offered by the SWC to teach students about stress and anxiety management. He believes Thrive Week is underutilized and seeks to better inform student societies of the event to drive greater engagement.

Building a stronger community

Singh offers a number of solutions to strengthen the communities of McMaster and Hamilton.

He wants to work with Metrolinx to extend bus service during welcome week and reintroduce canceled express buses. Singh says this will make it easier for off-campus students to travel to McMaster and allow the city to plan efficient transit routes with peak student times in mind.

To address housing concerns, Singh wants to conduct a study to determine average rental prices, availability and demand in Ward 1 Hamilton by working with partners such as Spark: A Center for Innovation in Social Science Research and MacPherson Institute. The findings of this study will be used as evidence to make the case for a more affordable housing market for student tenants.

Singh wants to use his own experience working with provincial and municipal governments to help educate students about their rights and obligations as tenants. Singh believes this initiative will make students aware of the regulations and their rights, which will better equip them to find off-campus housing.

Singh will advocate for the implementation of the Hamilton Light Rail Transit as soon as possible.

Environmental sustainability

Singh also focuses on increasing environmental sustainability on campus.

Singh will create a wto taste management initiative to better understand what waste is produced at McMaster facilities and provide solutions to help reduce this waste and sort it safely. Believing this to be an overlooked issue on campus, Singh hopes to work directly with facilities services, McMaster University student center management, and the sustainability office carry out audits to document waste production on campus and reflect on how this waste can be managed in a sustainable way.

Singh seeks to work with various faculties to develop more sustainable laboratory practices. He hopes to launch a pilot project that catalogs waste in laboratories, particularly with regard to the use of plastics. The results of this project will create a list of best practices to be implemented in laboratories to reduce waste.

Singh wants to work with hotel services to better understand food waste generation and artisanal methods to reduce waste generation. He has a double plan. First, reduce the overall production of excess food waste by campus services. Second, distribute the waste generated to disadvantaged students and food-insecure Hamiltonians.

Create a more equitable education

Singh aims to create a more equitable educational future for students.

Singh wants to increase the adoption of open educational resources to reduce and even eliminate textbook costs. He will advocate for a substantial increase in funding for OER and push for it to be included in the tenure process for faculty. To kickstart this, Singh will work with the Associate Vice Rector, OER Committee and McMaster Libraries to permanently implement OER into McMaster practices.

Additionally, it plans to introduce job opportunities where students can work as research assistants to help develop OER alongside professors. This will improve student-faculty relations and relieve professors of the responsibility of developing OER, in hopes of implementing them more quickly.

Singh seeks to increase experiential learning opportunities to give students more practical skills. In collaboration with the ocommunity engagement office, the Student Success Center and MacChangers, he hopes to reintroduce the canceled experiential learning opportunities.

Singh intends to work towards a tuition freeze and a reduction in higher tuition fees. Singh plans to advocate for a moratorium on tuition fee increases for the next three years and work with the Ontario First cycle Raised Alliance develop province-wide strategies to increase funding for universities outside of students.

Career development support

Singh hopes to increase career development support.

It aims to increase the online chat hours of the Student Success Center to allow students to have more opportunities to communicate within the department.

Singh plans use MSU to help students with resumes, cover letters, and other applications.

Singh hopes to foster more educational opportunities so that students are aware of the opportunities that exist after graduation and gain the necessary knowledge about potential careers. He hopes to centralize information on existing career supports and create more networking opportunities in collaboration with faculties, student associations and the SSC.

To learn more about Singh’s platform, visit his Instagram page @vote4simranjeet.

Image courtesy of jb_photography📸

Novera Shenin