McMaster Engineering Society · March 3-5, 2026
Will Nicholas Ching MakeTheCut
for VP Internal?
Stop accepting the status quo. Start asking how we make things better. I've spent the last year building tools that thousands of McMaster students depend on, now I want to build the systems that make your entire engineering experience better.
Voting will be done online via McMaster Email.
Impact by the numbers
Building at scale before running for office.
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MakeTheCut Users
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Total Visits Across All Sites
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YouTube Views
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MakeTheSeat Users
My Platform
Three pillars. One goal.
Engineering teaches us that when a system has too much friction, even the best can't overcome the activation energy required to start. I want to fix that.
Empowerment
- 1.Streamline club creation & reduce friction for getting involved
- 2.Reward high-performing clubs and promote strong team culture
- 3.Create meaningful learning opportunities for every member
- 4.Push for recorded lectures, content shouldn't be held hostage
- 5.Grow McMaster's list of elite design teams
Transparency
- 1.Anonymous surveys to gauge club engagement & hold leadership accountable
- 2.Direct communication lines so your concerns are actually heard
- 3.Work with faculty to release data that affects you
- 4.Publish itemized MES spending reports with VPF
- 5.Make governance mechanisms visible, not opaque
Efficiency
- 1.Terminate partnerships that drain resources without delivering value
- 2.Optimize MES internal processes end-to-end
- 3.Reinvest savings directly into students and clubs
- 4.Make MES work for you, less friction, more impact
My goal is simple: I want to make MES work for you, so you can spend less time fighting the system and more time building, creating, and showing the world what McMaster is capable of.
Projects & Impact
I don't just talk about fixing things.
Developing systems that serve thousands of students was not on my bingo card, but here we are.
MakeTheCut
Visit ↗I was frustrated that choosing a stream felt like throwing darts into the abyss, nobody knew the cutoffs. So I built it. MakeTheCut crowdsources GPA and stream preferences to predict specialization cutoffs more accurately than ever before.
MakeTheSeat
Visit ↗Real-time course availability tracker and timetable builder. Reverse-engineered McMaster's ERP system to automate retrieval of course availability and scheduling, giving students granular control over their timetable.
Experience
What I've shipped
Software Engineer & Security Researcher
McMaster Engineering Society, Infrastructure Technology
- ›Discovered critical server-side validation gaps permitting unauthenticated API access, bypassing booking limits, and vertical privilege escalation to gain admin access.
- ›Building a centralised Welcome Week portal to coordinate hundreds of reps for thousands of incoming students.
Firmware Developer
McMaster Formula Electric SAE
- ›Engineered a C++ telemetry pipeline to stream CAN bus data to a remote server.
- ›Leveraged Grafana to visualise mission-critical telemetry in real-time for race-day analytics.
Software Engineering Research Assistant
McMaster University
- ›Authored 2 research publications (under review) on applying LLMs to assess student reflections and automate feedback.
- ›Data analysis with NumPy, SciPy, Pandas; visualised learning trends with Seaborn and Matplotlib.
Full Stack Developer Intern
SkildLabs & Zeitdice
- ›Improved SkildLabs' LMS Outline Creator: streamlined UX, authentication, and 35% faster outline creation.
- ›Reduced Zeitdice's historical snapshot load times by 50% via image prefetching and optimised RESTful API endpoints.
Beyond the resume
Get to know me
The origin story
Engineering was never my original plan. I started out deep in marketing and filmmaking during the pandemic, I taught myself video editing and built a YouTube channel that hit over 400K views.
Eventually I joined student council, used filmmaking to promote events, then found First Tech Challenge robotics and discovered what it actually felt like to build something from scratch. That's what pulled me into engineering.
Our FTC team shared that passion with the community, running robotics workshops at local schools, hosting a summer camp, and winning 2 provincial filmmaking awards along the way.
Nowadays you'll find me skiing, biking, building at a hackathon, or studying at Hatch. "Studying" being a loose term, it turns out yapping is quite easy when there are good people around.
Quick facts
- ›4.0 GPA — Provost Honour List
- ›3× Hackathon winner, attended Hack The North, UofTHacks, Deltahacks, Meta Toronto Hackathon, Ontario Engineering Competition
- ›2× Provincial filmmaking award winner
- ›Former YouTuber — 400K+ views
- ›Smart home enthusiast & avid boba connoisseur
Hot take: Boba Tier List
Empirically determined. Non-negotiable.
Getting involved should be easy. These 4, 5, 6, or maybe 7 years are the best time in your life to learn, fail, and grow.
Let's make the most of it!