Even though they’re running separately, this year’s COMPSA candidates share common ground.

Presidential candidate Erin Gallagher, vice-president (university affairs) candidate Christina Chan, and vice-president (operations) candidate Christopher Radford, all CompSci ’16, all said they share a focus on increasing student involvement and the society’s overall accountability.

“We all have separate ideas but surprisingly they overlap,” Gallagher said.

Unlike most faculties, COMPSA candidates don’t run together as a team.

One of Gallagher’s main initiatives is to create an end of semester survey to generate feedback from computing students.

“A lot of students talks about how they don’t feel that USATS are addressing their concerns effectively about courses,” she said.

“Creating this end of term survey would basically get a combination of the majority of concerns on courses … so that students can really see that COMPSA is trying to create a liaison between students and faculty members.” This year’s Academic Affairs Commissioner for COMPSA, Gallagher said she also wants to increase her faculty’s accountability by having commissioners complete formal reports, which executives can only submit currently.

The reports would include upcoming goals and be submitted before general assembly.

Encouraging other council members to write goals will help COMPSA work as a team to accomplish them and make sure they’re targeting students’ needs, Gallagher said.

“We want to make COMPSA council something that is more formal,” she added. Vice president (university affairs) candidate Christina Chan agrees that developing a more professional attitude for the council is important.

“My focus would be to make sure everyone involved in COMPSA is actively working towards the same goal of making it a more presentable, professional student government,” said Chan, currently the internal affairs commissioner for COMPSA.

In addition to serving as logistics chair for Orientation Week 2014, she was also the first-year representative for COMPSA.

As vice-president (university affairs), Chan said she would act as a voice to students who aren’t currently enrolled in the School of Computing, such as high school students and alumni.

“I would ideally work towards reaching out towards more of our alumni and growing our alumni speaker program,” she said.

“[I’m] also looking into having a more concrete position in representing our school to potential students through open houses and such.” Vice president (operations) candidate Christopher Radford hopes to boost athletic and intramural participation, especially pertaining to the annual BEWIC sports marathon.

“I’d like to see us getting involved in that more and actually having teams go out,” he said.

Continuing to improve COMPSA relationships with ASUS is another one of his goals.

“I’d like to ensure that the services they [ASUS] provide are maximized to benefit our computing students, as well as looking at other opportunities for their services to encompass our students.” Although he has no previous experience on the council, he’s COMPSA’s chair for Orientation Week 2014.

Radford said he believes that the three software design students will make a strong team, despite not having worked together before.

“We haven’t necessarily worked together but we’ve done activities and events together and we’ve seen how each other acts and reacts in situations,” he said.

Each candidate also expressed an emphasis on maintaining their faculty’s community feeling.

“What I think is really great is we all have similar platforms, even though we’re coming from different perspectives,” Radford said.

“We want to show that we’re a body that wants to see change and we’re going to push that and not just float by.”