A day in the life of a KSA executive

VP Student Services discusses losing sleep and gaining confidence

Allison Gonzalez needed to get special permission from the design school faculty to become a Kwantlen Student Association executive.

“I’m not a political person, I’m just a design student. And for a design student who isn’t really interested in playing politics, I just saw an opportunity to try and make the student experience better,” she says.

It was around this time last year that Gonzalez was elected to the KSA council for the first time. During that election she was the only student to receive zero “no” votes as design faculty representative. In the span of about one month Gonzalez went from having no seat to being the president of the Kwantlen Student Association.

“Last semester I only took two classes, and this semester I’m taking three, which has really limited my sleep . . . I’m usually getting up at around six and going to bed around one,” says Gonzalez. “There’s just a lot of work to do, so you just have to find more hours in the day.”

Gonzalez notes that being a KSA executive is a “40 hour per week job,” though she finds herself doing way more, believing that many of her projects need more time. “We usually work between 60 to 80 hours per week.”

“I think if I only worked 40 hours, half the things wouldn’t get done.”

Gonzalez notes that she is significantly more confident now than she was last year.

“What I’ve learned is that issues that students face, although they may seem black and white, they’re almost always some sort of gray. Sometimes it’s just really interesting finding the balance between how to make sure you’re hearing everything properly, and advocating properly,” says Gonzalez. “Sometimes students come up with really great ideas, [like] ‘hey why don’t we do this?’, and you’re like ‘we already thought of that, but we can’t do it because of A, B, and C reasons, or we tried because of this reason.’ Sometimes that can be really disheartening.”

“It’s also pretty interesting managing different expectations and different stakeholders, because sometimes everyone’s opinion isn’t the same, so it’s just trying to find a common ground and make everyone happy.”

Gonzalez and the KSA faced some difficulties in the last year, the three standouts being the dispute with KMUN, the cuts to clubs funding, and perhaps most notably, the Kinder Morgan memorandum of understanding.

“It was definitely really difficult, we already knew that KPU has really tight budgets because of the funding cuts they’ve been receiving the last five or six years. We understand that they need funding, but we really didn’t understand the way they went about receiving this funding, or doing any community consultation.”

“We were able to speak with them, and although we were unhappy with them, they understood where we were coming from,” says Gonzalez.

The KSA was in a strange spot, while they didn’t want to support the MOU with Transmountain, they also didn’t want to hurt their relationship with the university. This led to a division within the KSA, with some councillors taking sides and even exchanging some tense language at their meeting.

The situation was difficult for some members of the KSA at the time, as they had been working on strengthening the relationship between themselves and university administration. Gonzalez has met with KPU President Alan Davis several times to discuss various issues, with a more recent one being funding solutions, which Gonzalez says will be available “within three months.”

Though Gonzalez isn’t the first female president of the KSA, she has found the student association to be inclusive and supportive. However, she says there have been times where she felt as though she was perhaps treated differently as a woman in an authority position.

“I’ve just noticed it a lot more,” says Gonzalez, “I’ve been in meetings where the person I was meeting with wouldn’t make eye contact with, wouldn’t speak to me, they’d only speak to my male counterpart, which is quite interesting, because I’ve never had that before. In my business, my best friend and I are the ones that interact with clients, and we’re both women, so I’ve never had to deal with someone only talking to my counterpart. But in terms of gender issues, I have noticed a few things here and there that I don’t know if they would have happened, had I been male. I feel that some of them definitely wouldn’t have ever happened, but I think the KSA as a whole is incredibly supportive and inclusive, and some people were so happy to have a woman as president, and they were actually quite supportive about it.”

“A lot of people can tell you what to expect, but you will not fully understand it until you’re in it. There are so many things that people told me, like this will be difficult, you’re going to have a hard time with this, you’ll grow so much as a person. You logically understand what somebody’s telling you, but it’s not until you actually go through it.”

Gonzalez says that she was thinking about this aspect in preparation for briefing the new executive team.

For now, Gonzalez looks to the university senate as her next step, and she’s running as a candidate in the upcoming election.