Amarjot Singh, Part of Largest Field in Election, Contends for SSOB Seat

Amarjot Singh: School of Business

Amarjot Singh is taking his Post-Graduate Diploma in Supply Chain Management.

Singh has been busy helping and advocating for his fellow students. “I’ve actually been working since I came on various issues, like scholarships. We don’t have any scholarships for post-graduate studies. Scholarships are just available for the undergraduate students.”

“In the learning commons, math and science centre, a lot of students are facing difficulty. For first-year students, free tutoring services are available. But when we came in September, in Supply Chain Management Program a lot of students in my class were from engineering or medical background or from IT backgrounds, so they face difficulty in accounts and stats and management information systems, so we were 3 guys who tutored them like most of our classmates, and that was for free, we didn’t charge anything.”

Singh explains that it isn’t easy for some students to find a tutor. “I want to do something for the students so that they don’t face any difficulty like, if you don’t have any tutors, they should introduce more tutors… The [population] of our university has raised a lot, to 5000 students now, so there must be more requirement for the tutors, and the students are facing difficulty, but they are not coming to any solution.”

“There’s also a groupism kind of issue here in our university. Everybody is from different countries, different parts of the world. People have formed their own groups within their community whether it’s in respect to the language; they feel comfortable speaking their own language.”

“But that’s not the diverse multicultural society we want to live in because, whenever in any part of the world you can see that when people have formed groups, it tears [communities apart], led to wars or quarrels. It’s like in World War 2 in [that] Nazis, they formed their groups.”

“I’m currently dealing with that kind of issues… I went to Halifax to attend the RISE Summit, it’s for Racialized and Indigenous students and I’m working with BIPOCUS. They are in Dalhousie University. BIPOCUS is Black, Indigenous people for their own community to fight racism … They are also planning to come here, in our university, to have a conference.”

“I actually wanted to go to CFS’ annual meeting, but there was actually no [other] person who was going so we could have afforded one more person because it is fully funded by the university—we have to represent the students. So I’ve talked to the president of the Student Union, Gunny is my very good friend, but he said if you are interested in doing something for the university you should stand in elections because they would prefer a student representative who is part of SRC than some other person who randomly shows up to [CFS], and I wanna go there.”

“They [at the RISE Summit] told me that you should attend that [CFS] summit also, you would learn more, you will be aware more—because I’m new in Canada—I will be more aware of the issues over here, the CFS and what they are doing as a group. Whether it’s relating to the fees issues, like they are fighting for free education and there’s a huge gap between the fees of a domestic student and an international student; it’s almost like 2 or 3 times in every university”

“So, these are the kind of issues I’m currently dealing with, and I want to improve the situation we are having over here. If I am elected, I would have a strong voice and more power to deal with issues.”

Singh also mentioned that students in the MBA program feel it is unfair they cannot participate in Students’ Union politics so he would like to work towards changing that as well.