SU By-Elections 2025: Faculty of Social Work
By Danijela Marcinkovic, October 8 2025—
Jenna Perna, a fourth-year social work student, is running for Faculty of Social Work representative in the 2025 SU By-Election. Her platform centers around student community building, developing career and volunteer opportunities and advocating for an improvement on academic electives and academic recognition.
Perna highlights her desire for student voices to be heard, and to ensure that the needs of social work students are adequately represented.
Community building
Perna states that the Faculty of Social Work spans across Canada, meaning that many students are completing their courses online. She wants to work towards fostering a stronger sense of communication and inclusion among all students across Canada. She also wants to generate stronger connections between third and fourth year students, and wants to foster collaboration among the Social Work Students’ Association and the Student’s Union.
Career and volunteer opportunities
Perna states that she will advocate for the creation and distribution of a volunteer opportunities list. The goal behind this is to help students become more engaged in field experience, gain required practicum preparation hours, and foster more community connections. She strives to ensure that students will be provided with official university letters for volunteer police checks, which will ultimately ease the costs accompanied by volunteer onboarding.
Academic electives
Perna emphasizes the lack in statistic options for social work students. She states that those seeking a MSW require a statistics course, yet the BSW program fails to offer one that does not require an additional course or semester. She wants to change this and instead advocate for a social work statistics option, and overall improvement of the electives available to students within the program. Along with this, Perna wants to reinstate the Dean’s List within the Faculty of Social work. She believes that it is paramount that students are provided with opportunities to be recognized for their hard work.
Online voting for the By-Election takes place Oct. 7, 8 and 9 through the my.ucalgary.ca Student Centre. A polling station will also be located in HNSC on the third floor 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each voting day.