We’re both honored and humbled by the opportunity to campaign to be your Student Body President and Executive Vice President. We President’s Cabinet as VP of Internal Affairs and VP of Communications respectively. This gives us a great understanding of the intricacies of SGA and extensive experience working with faculty, staff and administration to deal with a range of campus issues. The tagline of the campaign is “We Are Tech,” which embodies the fact that we have worked with a number of different student communities across campus to develop this platform and would like to continue to work with these students if elected. Our campaign aims to serve students and student organizations by connecting them with the resources they need to be successful.
The platform focuses on seven tenants. We have highlighted some of those points below.
Mental Health: We want to focus on working with the newly formed Center for Community Health and Wellbeing to rollout a wellness survey to asses the state of mental health on campus. One of the programs we envision coming out of this survey is the “Innovator” program that will train student leaders in different mental health resources on campus to help them deal with the everyday mental stresses of their members.
Campus safety: We want to ensure the safety and security of all students on campus, primarily in the area of late night campus transportation. Currently, there are not enough Stingerettes to meet the demand of students who use them, which makes safe transportation difficult. We plan on working with Parking and Transportation to form a partnership with Uber as a supplement to the current Stingerette system.
Academics: Study space for students will be a growing problem as parts of the library are closed and plans for a new Student Center are forthcoming. It is already hard enough to find study space in Clough, especially if you are in a group. We plan on working with administration to open up study space in buildings that go unused at night for organizations, group study and individual study. This issue needs to be addressed before it becomes an even bigger problem.
Empowering Students: In the past year, a lot of controversial issues have come up on our campus ranging from discrimination to tensions with the state legislature. We want to give students an opportunity to voice their concerns about anything they feel is an issue on campus by implementing a system similar to that of whitehouse.gov and of BART (Bias Assessment Response Team) from Ohio State. Students will be able to start a petition, amass signatures and have the petition discussed and voted on should it reach a certain threshold. If this petition passes, we will work with the administration to address the concern and deal with it in a satisfactory manner.
Our campaign has been a year’s work in progress. We’ve met with numerous administrators and student leaders across campus to give you a platform that is both comprehensive and achievable. This campaign is much more than providing a new perspective on campus issues or having the most experience, it is about who is most prepared to take on this role for the next year. This platform was created to empower students, so feel free to reach out to us!