Dalhousie Gazette: What is the biggest change you feel you’ve made this year?
Ramz Aziz: Things on the operations side. This place operates a lot more smoothly than it did a while back. We have a lot of our policies in place, we managed to find gaps—and we have many plans to address those gaps in our policy and procedures— and we’ve invested in our staff resources. I think we made the union a bit more decentralized, and what that means is putting a lot less money into administration, and more money into the hands of actual students, whether that be in the form of new services, new programs. In the new way we handle our budget, like when it comes to facility renewals, alterations, we really tried to disperse those funds over all campuses, just keeping in mind that the DSU is much larger than Studley campus, is much larger than the SUB.
DG: What do you wish you’d known when you started your job?
RA: I guess I wish I knew how difficult it is to do some projects, like how long things might take — all the different procedures and practices, it’s almost a learning process. Something simple, like hiring a staff member, might takes months because there’s all kinds of people you’re buying from, things have to undergo revisions a thousand times, it has to go through board of operations, things like that, it’s just really hard. Just how to make some big decisions possible.
DG: What advice would you give to Dan for next year?
RA: He should take the summer to really make a list of people, and just meet with them—at least once, and just show a face. That face-to-face contact is important. I think to rely more on staff to handle administration, like setting up meetings. I would also encourage Dan to not be afraid of considering things from a deep perspective, like questioning things. This is the first year, for example, we did the department budget review—it never happened before. Depending, a lot of the recommendations that came out of the review would have drastically changed things in scope, like reservations in nature, reservations in how we do it and why we do it. But those conversations need to be had. You can’t do everything in a year, that’s what I’ve learned. Once you start questioning, you really start finding out ways to improve.
DG: Who inspired you this year?
RA: I think [Cape Breton University President] David Wheeler with his zero tuition campaign. But I don’t know anything about David Wheeler except his campaign—I think I met him once. But that campaign was something ambitious. But maybe someone else has inspired me more? I think a student, her name is Ntombi [Nkiwane, second-year management student], she’s president of O’Brien. She speaks a lot, she does a lot of activist work, she’s a very well-informed student, who has given presentations to Senate, she speaks on panels for everything, from racism to Israeli apartheid. She’s a great role model for students. More than David Wheeler, she’s inspired me. It goes to show how important it is for students to be politicized and to be educated and to be contribute original thoughts to a conversation, she’s really inspiring to me in that sense.
DG: What are your plans after your presidency?
RA: I’m moving to Toronto, and hopefully getting married and finding a job for the summer, and starting law school in September.
DG: Is there anything you would like to add?
RA: No, no. I think the union is in a very good position to actually make a lot of big, meaningful changes in the way it operates, whether it be our food services or … oh, that was one thing I’m very happy about, the critical review of the food service.
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