MDS Student Representatives
In the new academic year, there will be one set of student representatives in Term 1 (Blocks 1-3) and another set in Term 2 (Blocks 4-6). Additionally, there will be a third set of student reps during the Capstone project period. Student representatives volunteer to represent their peers, acting as a liaison between students and MDS leadership. This allows us to monitor how the program is progressing and make adjustments if needed.
Student Representative Roles
In addition to the general role of gathering and communicating feedback, student representatives will have specific responsibilities. Each section will have five representatives, each dedicated to one of the following areas:
- Academic
- Social
- Sports and Recreation
- Career and Professional Development
- Mental Health and Wellness
Please note that these guidelines apply to the MDS Vancouver program. If you are enrolled in MDS Computational Linguistics (MDS CL), the policies may differ.
Guidelines for Student Representatives
1. Introduce yourself to your peers as the new student rep
We recommend introducing yourself as the new student representative via Slack. If there isn’t already a “students only” channel, please create one. You can try creating a private channel and then type /invite @v-students or /invite @cl-students to invite all students into the channel.
2. Collect feedback throughout the program
Your main responsibility is to collect feedback from your classmates. Feedback is usually collected informally and through one or more surveys during the program (once per block). Surveys with both quantitative and qualitative fields are especially useful. We suggest including both positively-framed questions and constructively-framed questions, such as “What is working well in this course?” and “What could be improved in this course?”
Please ensure that feedback passed on to instructors is constructive and does not contain personal attacks or hurtful comments. Part of your role is to moderate student discussions and/or remove/edit inappropriate comments from surveys. If you are unsure about something or need assistance, please reach out to your faculty contacts (likely the Option Co-Directors) for support.
3. Attend our team meeting
We’ll ask you to attend our in-person team meeting, typically at the end of the 2nd week of each block (or early in the 3rd week). During this meeting, student representatives often provide us with a summary of the survey results, which we archive for future reference. These results don’t need to be in a polished form.
4. Communicate back to the cohort
After the team meeting, we may ask the student representatives to communicate with students via Slack to relay any important information.
A Note on the Expected Time Commitment
We understand that the student representative role is in addition to your MDS coursework, which is already very demanding. This role is not meant to be overly time-consuming. We expect you to be active on Slack and to spend some time creating surveys, but we do not expect you to create polished presentations or documents. Raw survey results are acceptable (with the removal of any problematic comments). If you’re ever unsure about the scope of your duties as a student representative, please feel free to ask us.
A note on the role of the block rep feedback
For more details on how student representatives feedback to the MDS team, please see this document.