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Wednesday, September 18, 2013
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canada’s only Daily Student Newspaper • founded 1906
Volume 107, issue 9
Matchmaking for campus involvement
Involvement Compass app connects students to clubs Richard Raycraft News Editor Hundreds of clubs and volunteering organizations call Western their home, and choosing how to get involved can be an overwhelming experience. Luckily, a new test developed by the University Students’ Council will help assist students in finding the right fit. The Involvement Compass is an online quiz consisting of a variety of questions designed to identify potential student interests. Officially released yesterday, it matches students to the many involvement opportunities on campus and in the local community based on question answers and responses. Pat Whelan, USC president, explained that the rationale for the compass centred on getting students involved. “These opportunity providers, these clubs, not only will they be able to hopefully gather more traffic, but they’ll also get the right kind of traffic in the sense that the right students for that particular opportunity will get to do it,” he said. “At the same time the students will get a more meaningful experience because they’ll get to do what they really want to be doing.” The compass was a platform point during last year’s USC
elections for Whelan. The idea for a club and volunteer matching application came from the political compass quizzes used by the CBC during the last federal and provincial elections. “The concept mostly came from the vote compass which was a CBC thing,” he explained. “We thought this would be a super cool way to navigate our incredibly huge number of clubs.” “It’s entirely a student-driven project, and it’s certainly a step in the right direction for [the USC’s] online presence,” Whelan continued. The compass was developed over three months by Paul Craig, a fourth-year MIT and computer science student. Craig explained that the app is adaptable, allowing organizations to add themselves as possible results. It also responds to user feedback at the end of the quiz, meaning it will likely improve over time. “It will continue to get updated and it will continue to be pushed as a holistic solution towards getting involved on campus,” he said. “Students looking for opportunities will be able to find them, and based on a survey which is designed to measure interest in certain categories, it’s going to give relevant results, and it’ll be emergent — it’s going to get better over time.”
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Craig also mentioned his satisfaction at creating a solution to a pressing problem. “When I was a first year student I found it overwhelming,” he said. “After O-Week it was a bit difficult,
you get so many pamphlets and you hear so much about parties and events — this was something that personally I had trouble with as a student so it’s sort of gratifying to be providing a solution.”
Students can try the Involvement Compass at its clubs week booth in the University Community Centre or take the test online at involvementcompass.ca.
Gov’t investigates campus food supplier Megan Devlin News Editor
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Sysco, a food distribution company that provides food for Western’s residences and restaurants, has come under investigation by the Ontario government because of a potential lapse in food safety. In a story that broke earlier this summer, NBC claimed that Sysco was storing food — including meat and dairy — in outdoor, non-refrigerated sheds before shipping it to customers in the San Francisco Bay area. While originally thought to be an isolated incident, NBC recently reported that this practice was going on all over North America. The Ontario government has launched an investigation to see if the issue was happening here. “The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food is responsible for licensing fluid milk distributors, of which Sysco is one. The
Ministry, along with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, is looking into a potential lapse in food safety from Sysco, one of America’s largest food distributors,” Tanya Merissen, senior communications advisor with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, said in an e-mail. “The Ministry is also increasing the monitoring of the facilities, beginning with increasing the frequency of inspections of each Sysco licensed location to ensure continued compliance with Ontario’s dairy regulations,” Merissen continued. In a press release earlier this month, Bill DeLaney, president and CEO of Sysco said the company had discontinued use of third-party drop sites in which the problems were found. “In an abundance of caution, we have discontinued operation of all drop sites across Sysco. We deeply regret the concern created by our lapse in complying with our
policies,” DeLaney said. One of the drop locations under investigation by the Ministry is on Blakie Road in South London. “If there were any violations in Canada I would most likely suspend deliveries [from Sysco] until we get more information,” Frank Miller, director of hospitality services at Western, said. He stressed that food safety was his first priority, and that Western goes above and beyond its mandate by conducting multiple internal and external food safety audits every year. Barry Russel, manager of food safety at Western, elaborated that the temperatures of all delivery trucks are checked before their deliveries are unloaded, and that he didn’t believe the non-refrigeration problem would apply to the large orders received on campus.