Engineering School clubs granted separate voices on SAC

The decentralizing move means the school gains more votes on SAC and may get increased funding. The 15 clubs affiliated with the School of Engineering and Applied Science declared their independence last week as the Student Activities Council granted each club -- formerly represented by the Engineering Student Activities Council -- its own seat on SAC. For the past four years ESAC has served as the "umbrella body" for Engineering clubs at SAC meetings, where the ESAC treasurer presented the combined budget for all clubs, ESAC President Margaret Jones said. The system was problematic for the clubs, whose members complained of being shortchanged by the ESAC treasurer's inability to properly justify funding requests. "It is not possible for the ESAC treasurer to understand the needs of the club as well as the treasurer of the club," Society of Women in Engineering President and Engineering senior Vinaya Valloppillil said. "When we sent our own treasurer years ago we got a lot more funding than we did under ESAC." And since most Engineering clubs have not had experience with SAC, they are not familiar with the types of organizations that SAC typically funds. "When people ask for money themselves, they will hopefully get more experience," Jones, a Wharton and Engineering sophomore, said. In addition to helping clubs increase their ability to obtain their own funding, the change will benefit the Engineering School by giving each club its own vote, rather than only one for the entire school. "The more people we have on SAC, the more money we will hopefully get," Jones said. According to the SAC proposal, ESAC will now be able to resume its primary function -- "planning of activities for engineering students, such as Career Day, Family Weekend, Engineering Olympics and study breaks." Engineering clubs must go through a series of steps before gaining individual SAC recognition -- they must attend a training session, turn in a constitution and register on-line with the Office of Student Life, Activities and Facilities, Jones said. Clubs that follow these steps will be able to request their own budgets beginning next year, she added. Although most students said they expected the switch to benefit the Engineering School as a whole, some said it was not worthwhile for their clubs to register with SAC. Society of Systems Engineers Officer Jeremiah Kalan said his club may not register because members think the change won't benefit departmental clubs and may even hurt them marginally. "SAC doesn't like to fund presentations -- they fund things that we don't do," the Wharton and Engineering junior said. "I don't know how much it would benefit us to have a SAC representative go to all of the meetings." The Society of Systems Engineers is not worried, however, because it gets most of its money from the Systems Engineering Department, Kalan added.