Transparency, collaboration, and supporting students

The 2025-26 UWOSS president, Jordyn Matthews, has big plans for this year — and the future of the optometry student society.

By Kavya Piraba

In her third year of optometry school, Jordyn Matthews is excited about her new position as the president of the University of Waterloo Optometry Student Society (UWOSS). She is ready to take on new initiatives, overcome obstacles and represent her fellow students with pride. 

Being in optometry, leadership is an important skill to have, not only being able to collaborate with other people but also being able to step up when things need to be done. UWOSS presidency is a good opportunity for me to showcase what I can do and allow me to practice those skills as well. It is also really fun to be a part of all the events and to see everyone in our community get involved. I was inspired to join UWOSS as president after being a social representative in first year, which allowed me to get a glimpse of what happens in the background. I liked that UWOSS acts like the glue between all the clubs that bring the community and student body together. It provides an opportunity for students to be social and fun in an academic field. 

Presidency mostly consists of ensuring UWOSS is organized and up to date. I oversee the UWOSS council, which includes social, communication, sponsorship and finance executives, who all play an impactful part in their respective areas. I also serve as a link between UWOSS and the Waterloo Undergraduate Student Association (WUSA), Faculty of Science Foundation and the Undergraduate Studies Committee (UGSC). There, I advocate for things the student body would like, such as equipment and student spaces. However, the majority of my role consists of communicating with each team and making sure that they feel supported. 

I decided to become an optometrist later on in my academic career. During my third or fourth year of undergraduate physics studies at the University of Windsor, I was considering a couple of different fields, but I didn't feel very strongly pulled towards any of them. I thought that optometry was a good opportunity for variety, since it included things outside the clinic like research, and wasn't confined to just a day-to-day job. I like learning, so one of the main factors that pulled me to optometry was the continuous growth that comes with it. 

My top priorities for UWOSS this year are transparency, collaboration and overall providing support. I'd also like to spend time acknowledging and appreciating my team's hard work and efforts that happen in the back end. Regarding transparency, I want to get more feedback from our students and see how we can improve our events and services. My priority would be to improve our current events, and then we can work on creating new events as well.

In terms of collaboration with other clubs, I'm glad that all the club presidents are close and have the same mindset. This makes it easy for us to work together, not necessarily to overlap events, but to combine efforts to host better-quality events.

One long-term change I would like to make as president would be to help relieve our students from the costs of certain events. We can make this change possible by working with more sponsors, especially with companies that would like to be better known amongst optometry students. This would be a win-win situation, where external companies can be advertised to a large audience and we can effectively reduce student fees. The end goal is to make UWOSS a fully self-funded club where our students don't have to pay for anything. This goal will likely take years to achieve, but there's no better time to start than now.  

Another change I'd like to implement would be to create a centralized hub for students to give their feedback. This ties in with transparency, as I would also like students to have access to our constitution, budgets and meeting minutes so that UWOSS is held accountable too.

I've been a part of most UWOSS events so far, but the event I'm most excited for is Skit Night! I usually watch it every year with my cohort, but this time I think it will be really cool to see what happens behind the scenes. I'll get a sneak peek of all the skits beforehand, but it'll be really nice to see the community come together and to see all the effort that's put into them from every class. I'm looking forward to seeing what the faculty thinks of all the performances, too!

From class representatives to the whole council, I really appreciate everything that the UWOSS members do. Whether it's planning events or organizing equipment sales, they put in a lot of work that goes unrecognized. I would encourage the students to also show their appreciation to their classmates in UWOSS too. 

Students should also check out the other clubs, which host a variety of events. Our program can be hard work sometimes, but there's so many great memories to be made!