C/O Simranjeet Singh
Meet Simranjeet Singh, one of the candidates running to become MSU president
Simranjeet Singh is a fourth-year biomedical discovery and commercialization student at McMaster. Currently, Singh serves as the McMaster Students Union’s associate vice president: services. He is currently running to become the next MSU president.
Singh has provided a platform of five core foundations: student wellness, building a stronger community, environmental sustainability, creating more equitable education and career development support.
Student Wellness
Singh emphasizes his commitment to student wellness.
He wants to increase collaboration between the Student Wellness Centre and various student groups around campus, including the MSU. To facilitate this, Singh proposes the creation of a Student Wellness Centre Advisory Committee to serve as a direct liaison between the SWC and leaders of various student bodies. With this, he wishes to increase the number of support groups and staff at SWC enabling a more students to access the service. Singh also hopes to expand Thrive Week, a service offered by the SWC to teach students about stress management and anxiety He believes Thrive Week is underutilized and looks to better inform student societies of the event to garner greater engagement.
Building a Stronger Community
Singh proposes a number of solutions to strengthen the McMaster and Hamilton communities.
He wishes to work with Metrolinx to expand bus service during Welcome Week and reintroduce cancelled express buses. Singh states that this will ease the commute to McMaster for off-campus students and allow the city to plan effective transit routes when taking into consideration peak student times.
To address housing concerns, Singh wants to conduct a study to determine average rental prices, availability and demand in Ward 1 of Hamilton by collaborating with partners such as Spark: A Centre for Social Science Research Innovation and the MacPherson Institute. The findings of this research study will serve as evidence to advocate for a more affordable housing market for renting students.
Singh wants to utilize his own experiences of working with provincial and municipal governments to help inform students of their rights and obligations as tenants. Singh believes this initiative will increase student awareness of bylaws and their rights which will better equip them to navigate finding off-campus housing.
He wants to support students facing income insecurity or poverty through support increased and bursaries, specifically through the McMaster Access Strategy, a group dedicated to aiding students from marginalized communities in Hamilton access post-secondary education.
Singh will advocate to implement the Hamilton light-rail transit as soon as possible.
Environmental Sustainability
Singh also focuses on increasing environmental sustainability across campus.
Singh will create a waste management initiative to better understand what waste is produced at McMaster facilities and offer solutions to help this waste be reduced and safely sorted. Believing this to be an overlooked issue on campus, Singh hopes to work directly with facility services, McMaster University Student Center management and the office of sustainability to perform audits to document waste production on campus and brainstorm how this waste can be sustainably managed.
Singh looks to work with various faculties to develop more sustainable lab practices. He hopes to launch a pilot project that catalogues waste in labs, especially as it relates to the use of plastics. The findings from this project will create a list of best practices to implement within labs to reduce waste.
Singh wants to work with hospitality services to better understand production of food waste and craft methods to reduce waste production. He has a two-fold plan. First, reduce overall production of excess food waste by campus services. Second, distributing waste generated to disadvantaged students and Hamiltonians experiencing food insecurity.
Creating 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 to substantially increase funding for OER and push to include this as part of the professor tenure process. To kickstart this, Singh will collaborate with the Associate Vice Provost, the OER committee and McMaster Libraries to implement OERs permanently within McMaster’s practices.
Furthermore, he plans to introduce job opportunities in which students may work as research assistants to help develop OER alongside professors. This will better student-faculty relations and alleviate professors of the responsibility of developing OER, hoping to implement them faster.
Singh looks to increase experiential learning opportunities to give students more hands-on skills. In collaboration with the office of community engagement, the Student Success Center and MacChangers, he hopes to reintroduce cancelled experiential learning opportunities.
Singh intends to work towards a tuition freeze and a reduction in any more increased tuition costs. Singh plans to advocate for a moratorium on increase in tuition for the next three years and work with the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance to develop province-wide strategies to increase university funding outside of students.
Career Development Support
Singh hopes to increase career development support.
He aims to increase online chat hours of the Student Success Center to allow students more opportunities to communicate within the department.
Singh plans use the MSU to help support students with resumes, cover letters and other applications.
Singh hopes to foster a greater number of educational opportunities so students learn of opportunities that exist after graduation and gain necessary insights into potential careers. He hopes to centralize information about existing career supports and create more networking opportunities in tandem with faculties, student societies and the SSC.
To learn more about Singh’s platform, visit his Instagram page @vote4simranjeet.
For over 25 years the McMaster Alumni Association has partnered with affinity companies to bring valuable services and discounted benefits to students, alumni as well as faculty and staff. If you’re a student, you may have encountered some friendly folks reaching out to you to sign up for a BMO McMaster MasterCard in the Student Centre. And perhaps you might have looked into renters insurance in your second year when you moved off campus through TD Insurance Meloche Monnex. We hope you’ve enjoyed flashing your MasterCard with the image of our beloved Edwards Arch and felt a little surge of pride when a cashier or server comments on the great looking card, or says, oh, hey, I go to MAC too! Perhaps when you graduate, you’ll need to replace your health and dental insurance and will look to Manulife Financial for that. Further on, you’ll switch that renters insurance to house insurance and may want to protect your growing family with life insurance. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves!
The MAA’s goal with the affinity programs has always been to offer a great deal or added value on a service or product you need. And, over the years, thousands of students and alumni have participated in these programs. With excellent customer service survey reports and impressive retention rates, we are confident that the programs are delivering the quality experience that we expect.
You may wonder what else the alumni association get out of these programs. You may enjoy knowing that your participation in these programs helps to contribute to programs and initiatives back here at MAC, without any additional cost to you! Over the years, through growth in these programs, the MAA has supported student bursaries and scholarships, helped fund Alumni Field, the McMaster University Student Centre, helped bring you Light up the Night, as well as countless student group initiatives, conferences and events that contribute to the diverse learning and social opportunities that make for an awesome university experience.
So, if you’re carrying that McMaster MasterCard in your wallet, we hope you feel good about using it and we hope you are even more stoked about the discount you received on your insurance. If you’d like to learn more about the affinity programs offered through the association, check us out anytime at alumni.mcmaster.ca – Access Benefits. Questions? Contact alumni@mcmaster.ca or call 905-525-9140, x. 23900. And hey, thanks for your participation!
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