RCSA Elections
Check your UofT email during the election dates for your voting link, or cast your vote on the RC Portal.
Want to see the candidates running in the RCSA election present their platforms? Looking to see what RCSA has been up to and what changes are being made?
Our Annual General Meeting, typically held in January, is the yearly election platform for Presidential & Vice Presidential candidates to present their vision and goals for RCSA through speeches. We will also provide information about Director and Committee Hiring during the meeting.
Join us to see what your vote will look like in this year’s RCSA elections and what we have in store!
Congratulations to our incoming PVP for the 2026-2027 academic year: Braden Chau and Katherina Pan!
Our President
Braden Chau (He/Him)
President
RCSA has been an essential part of my Rotman Commerce journey from the very beginning. In my first year, when RC felt unfamiliar and intimidating, but RCSA helped make the community feel welcoming and accessible. Its resources, events, and student leaders encouraged me to get involved and stay engaged through challenges, leading me from mentee to committee member and now Director. These experiences have given me a clear understanding of the responsibility that comes with leading the largest student association at Rotman and the importance of student led initiatives.
As President, I want to strengthen the connection between students and the resources available to them by putting students at the front of Rotman-facing initiatives, especially in academic and career programming. From my experience, students are more willing to engage when they see peers involved, and I believe RCSA is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between students and administration while continuing to support students in a meaningful way.
Our Vice-President
Katherina Pan (She/Her)
Vice-President
From being a mentee, to a committee member, and now Events Co-Director, I have seen firsthand how strongly RCSA lives up to its mission of advocating for and supporting students. Since my very first interview with one of our past Vice Presidents, I felt welcomed into a community that has helped me out more times than I can count, whether that be for courses, my career, or just creating positive environments to relax.
In this speech, I want to talk about three things: my commitment to RCSA, and two initiatives I would love to implement with the team.
First, I have already touched on this, but I want to give back to the RCSA community over and beyond how helpful it’s been for me. One story that stuck with me greatly was during our CEO Case Competition. In this event, particularly, our events team was running back and forth across rooms, and one of my impromptu tasks became guiding and talking to first-year groups on the way to their presentation room. I was able to speak to a few groups and distract them by saying positive words of encouragement and just talking about things in life. One team in particular ended up placing second and came up to me afterwards to tell me that they appreciated our discussion before their presentation, saying I helped calm them down with lighthearted conversations about their future careers. I reconnected with several of these students again at Presidents’ Panel, and now some of them are RCSA mentees, and I am a mentor to one of them myself! Talking to students and hearing their positive feedback was so rewarding to me; I was grateful to be in a position where I could make a beneficial impact.
Second, I’m hoping to build RCSA’s community further. While it is RCSA’s prerogative to provide for students, I think this comes in more forms than us being the support, directly. More specifically, facilitating this support is equally as, if not more, efficient for fostering our community. After seeing the benefits of our events firsthand, I’ve found that students are the most engaged during open-networking sessions, when everyone can talk to each other and listen to each other’s stories. That is why I would like to implement an initiative called “To All the First Years I Used to Be”. It would involve a bunch of letters that upper-year students have written, across a variety of categories such as “Things I Wish I Knew About Courses” and “Things I Wish I Knew About University Life”.
Third, I think working as a team to strengthen communication and collaboration across portfolios would help us connect to RC students more effectively. As Events Co-Director, I was genuinely in awe of all the great ideas that our committee members had and how beautiful it was when those ideas came to life. However, I realized these insights can remain siloed within portfolios and past years. As Vice President, I want to create more channels for our portfolios to collaborate more with more frequent check-ins, and to ensure that lessons learnt and insights are gained from past years are trickled down as they should be.
All this to say, I’m grateful for the impact RCSA’s had on my undergraduate career and only hope to keep our association’s legacy going for years ahead.
Communication! Having frequent check-ins and constantly talking to other portfolios about their thoughts on existing initiatives, as well as any ideas that have yet to be implemented, will help ensure that all portfolios’ ideas are being brought to life. I think that on top of having monthly RCSA-wide meetings, we can make more use of our Family Group Chat and create chats and meetings for various portfolios that work together often, such as ISL and Marketing.
At the beginning, I was really set on planning our events to a tee, and sticking to that rigid schedule. As we held more events, and I became more experienced in organizing them, I realized that it is very important to be able to change your plan, even if it is at the last minute, since there are always going to be surprises that can derail your initial thoughts. Now, I have come to realize that gauging the opinions of our student attendees, as well as any collaborators, is far more effective when it comes to creating events than being a detailed planner.
Yes! For our upper years, I think it’s especially important to take mental health into consideration, since they are looking into post-graduate opportunities while juggling a full course load. I am, personally, a huge advocate for mental health, and I think it is so important in everyone’s lives. While RCSA currently has a lot of low-stress professional events like the CEO Case Competition and some more fun ones like the Charity Trivia Night, we have significantly fewer events that are geared towards mental health. That is why I had an idea to create a “Positivtree” whereby RCSA helps facilitate the creation of a post-it board, in the shape of a tree. On these post-its, students will be able to drop by and write about something positive that has happened to them that week, whether it be getting 8 hours of sleep or a job that they really wanted. At the end of the week, we can create a digital copy and send it in our newsletter to help spread some positivity.
This event would be facilitated during orientation, at the very start of the school year for new RC students. Prior to the start of the school year, RCSA can send out their email newsletter asking upper-years to write an email (or a handwritten letter to be dropped off) to the RCSA email account. Ideally, we would reach out to them right before the exam season of the prior year starts, to gain interest in as many upper-years as we can. From then on, over the summer, the RCSA team can coordinate all the letters and print any that are necessary, to have them in stacks for the first-years to grab. Alternatively, if we wanted to use email altogether, we could have first-years fill out a Google Form for the category of letter they would like to receive, and have all the upper-years write electronic versions of their words of wisdom!
