Vol. 105 Issue 106
@thepittnews ZEN
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Pittnews.com
Board appoints Judicial Committee Emily Ahlin and Abbey Reighard The Pitt News Staff
Former Student Government Board President Mike Nites’ power still lingers over the current Board’s decisions. The Board voted to approve nine, including one alternative, Judicial Committee member nominations at its public meeting on Tuesday in Nordy’s Place. A Nominating Task Force selected nine out of 16 applicants after interviews on Feb. 1 in the William Pitt Union. The applications were available last November, according to Board President Graeme Meyer. Nites, Meyer, Executive Vice President Nasreen Harun and former and current Judicial Committee Chairs Audrey Winn and Kyle Hoch, respectively, sat on the task force. This is the first year that such a task force has selected standing committee members, who were
previously selected by committee chairs. Standing committees include Judicial, as well as Elections and Allocations. The creation of the task force ultimately resulted from Bill 024, passed on Nov. 11, which Meyer could not provide at the time of publication. The passage of Bill 024 created the Code’s Article 4, which states that former and current presidents would select standing committee chairs and members. In this case, those members were Nites and Meyer. Nites, who graduated last December, could not be reached for comment before publication. Revisions to the committee selections processes were just a few of many changes adopted by the former Board in its SGB Governing Code on Jan. 14, 2014. Nites drafted the code, according to a previous article in The Pitt News. The Board then voted to changed the nominating
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Students to compete in startup competition Harrison Kaminsky and Abbey Reighard The Pitt News Staff
Hannah Fitzpatrick, a nursing student, instructs the yoga club in the William Pitt Union. Meghan Sunners | Staff Photographer
Andrew Buchmann wants more people to save their money. One day, while he was eating lunch at Hemingway’s Cafe, Buchmann — a senior majoring in finance and supply chain management — learned that the restaurant offers half-off meals from 2 to 4 p.m. each day. In the three years Buchmann’s been at Pitt, he said he never knew about the special, even though the restaurant is less than half a block from campus. “We realized that there are all kinds of deals like that at a lot of places in Oakland, and most people only know a handful of those deals at most,” Buchmann said. “So why not provide an interactive way for people to find out about all of them in one central place?” To solve this problem, Buchmann and a team of three other Pitt students developed Boon, a mobile app concept designed to help students find daily deals. The team is so confident in the success of their app that they’ve decided to enter their proposal in this year’s seventh annual Randall Family Big Idea Competition. The registration period for teams participating in the competition ends Feb. 15.
The Big Idea Competition awards cash — totalling $100,000 — to student entrepreneurs who want to market their ideas. This year’s competition will award $25,000 to the team whose idea has most commercialization promise. In addition to the grand prize, the competition will also award three first-place teams $15,000 each, four second-place teams $5,000 each, two third-place teams $3,000 each and two video submission winners $2,000 each. Pitt’s Innovation Institute— a collaboration formed in 2014 between the Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence, Office of Technology Management and Office of Enterprise Development — hosted the competition for the first time last year. Teams, which must be made up of at least two members and students from at least two of Pitt’s schools, can apply on the Innovation Institute’s website. After student groups register, the competition will have three elimination periods, leading up to the final round on April 2. Students who participate get more than just competition experience by stepping up to the challenge, according to one organizer Babs Carryer. Read the rest online at Pittnews.com.