IVSA master of coins and his two cents
Hello everyone!
This is your favourite Treasurer speaking. Since the last time we got in touch, there are many updates.
Before we start on the IVSA stuff, here are some updates on non-IVSA stuff. The exams that were making my life so much harder finished, and I survived!! Woohoo. Currently, we are on our rotations, so I get to see how veterinary practice really is, or at least something close to it. You never know exactly how it is until you use the money you earn from your services to pay the bills. Graduation is getting closer, and I am getting anxious and sad, since the best period of my life is finishing. Thankfully, IVSA duties help me postpone my graduations, so I can enjoy student life a bit more.
The highlight of this period was the live meeting. It took place in Thessaloniki, at my house. It finished a few days ago, which means that I am still cleaning my house. I was happy to host Anil, Emma, Aqil, Sofie, Anka, Andrei and Ondrej and I was sad that the rest of the ExCo and the Secretariat were not able to attend. It is important to be able to discuss in person with the rest of the team, as it is more productive than faceless email exchanges or skype meetings. There are some student organizations who house their ExCo all together all year. This is amazing for the organization since the ExCo can discuss and brainstorm ideas almost all day, everyday, and also makes them a very solid team. This is really hard to mimic, since there are Officials from all around the world and veterinary medicine is a hard and expensive subject to study, so no one can afford to dedicate a year solely on IVSA. The live meeting is something that helps achieve what is mentioned above in a way more suited to our situation.
During this meeting, we had some looong meetings which required a large amount of coffee, which I had to prepare since I was the host. I have been seeing coffee in my dreams for a couple of days for that reason. But it was worth it since we had a lot of productive discussions in and out of the meeting, got to know each other better (fun fact; Anka, our MOD walks faster than I run), and it was a good opportunity to show off a small part of Thessaloniki. Next meeting will be in Taiwan with more people present hopefully.
What took most of my time these few days was sending the invoices to the chapters and assisting if issues came up. All invoices are now sent so we are on the best phase, i.e. the collect-money-from-everyone phase.
As I have promised, since we finished with the invoices, Emma and I are currently working on the relocation of the bank. This takes some time and effort, but thankfully I have a lot of time and Emma is very capable, so I believe that until the end of our term we will have finished the project. When we have a new bank account, June and I will work on finding another payment method. We haven’t forgotten it. It is a major issue and we will have found a new one by the end of our term. It is a shame to waste so much money on bank transactions. Banks have money, students do not.
Thank you for the time you have spent reading this post.
