Tuesday March 27, 2012
Volume CXXXIII Issue 8
on April 2-5 Q&A with SGA Presidential candidates
1. What are the most important campus issues to your campaign?
2. How would the average student’s life be improved if your ticket was elected?
3. How do you plan to get more people involved and interested in campus life?
4. What qualities does your ticket have that make you better than the others?
JAMES SCOTT
ABDUL TWAHIR
JOHN LI
Academics, communication, accountability, and visibility. With academics, we will promote focusing on the reason we’re here -- a high quality education. With communication, we want to help push information to students regarding what’s happening with campus and campus events. With accountability and visibility, we want you to know both what the SGA is accomplishing and how they are managing your money.
The number one issue to our campaign is improving every student’s college experience and having an SGA that works for all students. This means increasing the value gained by our education, the quality of food on campus and having a student union that works for every student. These are the issues we have been working on in our time in the SGA so far and are the issues that we are going to be focusing on most vehemently.
The empowerment of clubs and organizations will be the single most important issue to my administration. My executive team is dedicated to the success of clubs and organizations by giving them the support they need. We will continue to build working relationships with these organizations so that they will be at easy in giving feedback to the SGA to improve our services.
The SGA exists to represent the students’ concerns to administration and vice versa. James’ experience already provides a supportive connection between our classmates and our school’s administration. John’s and Joe’s leadership, experience, charisma, and work ethic will give students and student organizations peace-of-mind that they can come to the SGA with any concern and it will be addressed and feedback will be given.
By focusing on finances and the every student’s college experience, we believe we will student lives. We will increase funding for student organizations, leading to better programing for students. We will also improve the dining experience on campus by raising the quality of food and service provide. We believe that these changes and many others that we are going to enact will improve every student’s college experience and life.
I would respectfully disagree with the notion that there is an “average student.” We have too diverse of a community, not just in ethnicity, race and culture, but also in age and experience, to be averaged out. Instead of looking at the students as some kind of statistics, my team believes in actively reaching out to individual students and letting them know what the SGA has to offer. We will push for a culture of service so that ANY student will find it easier to navigate through SGA related issue.
Our campaign has revolved around creating a unified campus community, but student involvement begins with the incoming class and continues with appropriate advertising of organization and campus events. Our ticket will drive SGA to work with the Orientation Team, ERRSA, and Housing and Residence Life to interact and connect with new students. Also, before students can get involved on campus, they have to do well in class. Our ticket aspires to cosponsor weekly study sessions with cookies and coffee.
One of the things that we have loved so much about this election is the opportunity we have had to talk to so many students be it at club meetings or a one on one. After one of these meetings, a fellow student (Andrew) came up to us and said that he really liked talking to us about campus life. We feel that having the SGA work with as much organization as possible and outreaching to athletics will to greater student life involvement.
In a short two weeks of “campaigning,” we already got more students involved or interested in the election process than ever before. Part of the reason for that is, we did the opposite of campaigning. Instead of talking, we did mostly listening. We are actively building relationships so that we can reach out to as many students as possible. So far it is showing great results, but we will not stop here.
Commitment to service and experience; Between the three of us we have over 6 years of SGA experience, 2 and a half of that as executives. Abdul has been the SGA vice-President for a year and a half and Chris the SGA Treasurer for a year. We believe that this experience will ultimately lead to an SGA that works better for every student, an SGA that can focus on serving the student body from day one.
What really sets us apart from the other tickets is that we have a clear governing philosophy, that of servant leadership. Our article in the Avion gives clear definition of what we mean by that. So when you bring an issue to us, you know what to expect. And if we ever veer away from that servant attitude, I ask you personally to please hold us accountable.
Combined, James, John, and Joe exhibit: Experience, Fresh Ideas, Charisma, Professionalism, and Leadership.