During last spring’s Student Federation of the University of Ottawa elections, you saw their faces plastered all over campus, the student newspapers, your news feed and so much more. Amidst the usual SFUO campaign mentality of every man for himself, this dynamic duo did something out of the ordinary; they ran a duel campaign and announced that if one of them wouldn’t get elected the other would step down. It was Plato and Spiteri or neither of them.
In the past few years, most students were not the biggest fans of the SFUO, which is ironic since its sole purpose is to serve the student body. But as with most organizations, drama arises and it’s the stakeholders that always pay the price. Some students felt as though the SFUO were not doing their job properly and that the students weren’t well represented. Ethan Plato, the President of the SFUO, wants to change that. Ethan is a dynamic individual that has been actively involved with PIDSSA in the past and from there eventually got involved in the Student Fed. He told Her Campus U Ottawa that “ [he is] really looking forward to working with the rest of the Executive on ways [they] can get students more engaged with the Student Federation and all that it has to offer.” He hopes that by next spring voter turnout will be over 20%.
Even though the SFUO may have been flawed in the past, it has done some things right. Classic U Ottawa events such as Guerre des Tuques and Winter Challenge would not exist without the SFUO. The awesome resource centers such as the Pride Center and our amazing student bar ‘1848’ are all great examples of why the SFUO is here and the good they do for the student body. However, the turnout for Winter Challenge last year was quite minimal. The main reason was simply because new students just weren’t aware of it. For those of you that are reading this and wondering What the heck is Winter Challenge?! It’s a fun week long competition that happens during the winter (duh!). The teams consist of two girls and two guys and together they complete daily two minute long obstacle courses. Basically everyone wins a prize and its always tons of fun! Jozef Spiteri, the VP Social of the SFUO, was already solving the lack of participation for Winter Challenge before classes even started! He cleverly got someone to dress up as a yeti (or was it a real yeti?!) to sign up first year students for Winter Challenge during Fedfest. Jozef was very involved with the Student Association of the Faculty of Arts before deciding to join the SFUO. He has a lot of event planning experience which is pretty obvious to anyone that participated in 101 Week. He is also bringing back Party Party, an events volunteer group, which was discontinued last year. He is also currently in the process of creating a huge 6000 student dodge ball game on campus.
These fresh new faces, with their down-to-earth persona as well as their hard working nature, might just be what the SFUO needs in order to restore the faith from the student body. Stay tuned, we expect great things from this pair and I highly doubt we will be disappointed.