Incumbent and newly-appointed vice-chair of the Senate Teaching and Learning Committee Kareem Hassib is running for his third year in a row to be one of UBC’s student senators-at-large.
Hassib wants to run again to ensure continuity in student advocacy, maintain institutional memory in the Student Senate Caucus, an informal student representative voting block, and to facilitate smooth senator turnover.
“Something I've learned being on Senate is that so much of this work takes a lot of time … you'll often hear people refer to Senate as a glacial body, meaning it moves at a very slow pace,” Hassib said in an interview with The Ubyssey.
“When your student advocates are turning over every year, when there's people coming and going, it's often hard to remember what students were fighting for.”
In his current role as vice-chair, Hassib said he has introduced discussions of the Indigenous Strategic Plan into the committee and pushed for new dialogue on the possibility of extending UBC’s course add/drop deadline.
If elected to the Senate again, Hassib’s top priorities include revising policies that harm marginalized students, expanding student resources and addressing student financial relief.
“That would be policies such as policy LR7, the disability accommodations policy, which currently requires you to have a diagnosis and also doesn't have any framework to cover temporary disabilities,” Hassib said.
Hassib also highlighted the importance of improving exam hardship policies, specifically policy V-102, which only allows students to move an exam if they have more than two on the same day.
“As of right now, if you have three exams, but they're just out of a span of a day, or if you have two exams back-to-back, there's no exceptions for those situations,” Hassib said. “So to make sure that students have time to study, especially students who have to work part time [and] students with chronic conditions … [who] can't really study for more than one thing at a time, [we need to make] sure that they can be accommodated.”
Hassib also said he would advocate for a public exam database, expanded co-op and research opportunities, resources for affiliated college students and increased funding for the UBC Ombuds Office and the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund.
Hassib also expressed his commitment to the Senate and emphasized the importance of active participation, noting that many student representatives have missed meetings due to external conflicts and priorities elsewhere.
“I read every Senate docket before Senate meetings …. In my two years of being on Senate, I've only missed one Senate meeting.”
Hassib also regularly posts Senate updates to his Instagram account and on the UBC subreddit, an act he said he does for transparency.
One of the biggest challenges Hassib named for the upcoming year is the departure of many long-serving Senate members, and said his experience supporting new senators could help a possibly high turnover in the Student Senate Caucus.
“That's going to be a struggle this year, but I'm confident that … I'm going to be able to help the student senate caucus successfully push for these reforms that we want.”
This article is part of our 2025 AMS Elections coverage. Follow us at @UbysseyNews on X (formerly Twitter) and follow our election coverage starting March 3.
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