With the experience of seven years of parenting, Monica Sanchez
Rivas says she can handle any responsibility.
Married and raising a son, Sanchez is familiar with the
challenges of balancing family life and school, as she pursues her
Ph.D. in education.
As a mother, one of Sanchez’s goals if elected Graduate
Students Association president would be to make UCLA more amenable
to students with children.
“I want there to be more bathrooms with diaper changers on
campus, as well as more family-friendly events,” Sanchez
said.
“Things like barbecues where kids can run around would be
great,” she said.
Sanchez’s goals for her presidency also include expanding
services to help graduate students reach academic and professional
goals, supporting graduate student community involvement and
promoting diversity.
Sanchez is the current GSA director of community service, a
relatively new position; she is the second person to be appointed
to the post.
“She defined our director of community service. When
Monica came on board, she actually brought people together,”
said Arpi Siyahian, GSA director of discretionary funding.
During her tenure as director of community service, Sanchez
established the Community Service Commission for graduate students,
recruiting six community service commissioners from different GSA
programs to meet once a month and coordinate events.
“People are already out there doing community service. GSA
is not like the undergraduate program, where everyone is very
organized and cohesive. We had a lot of groups doing community
service, and my job was about bringing all of them together,”
Sanchez said.
In addition to her experience raising a family, Sanchez has
experience with event programming.
Over the summer, she helped to organize the first graduate
student orientation, which she sees as an important way to reach
out to new students.
“It’s important to interact with (graduate) students
and get them involved early,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez also worked in an organizational role earlier this year
when she helped to organize a holiday Grad Bar event in which
students brought gifts and money to be donated to sick children at
UCLA’s Mattel Children’s Hospital.
“Graduate students are very diverse. Monica brought
together people from medicine to humanities to exchange ideas and
plan events,” Siyahian said.
Sanchez has served on the GSA Education Council Committee on
Degrees and Academics as a student representative, where she
provided a student perspective on decisions made in the UCLA
Department of Education.
Sanchez is also the GSA representative on the Student Activities
Center Board of Governors.
“This was a place where I was able to interact with an
extremely diverse group of people. I meet with representatives from
all kinds of groups, as well as undergraduate and graduate students
(of) varying ages and backgrounds, and administrators,”
Sanchez said.
In addition to her experience with GSA, Sanchez has also been a
teaching assistant in the UCLA Department of Chicana/o Studies, a
graduate student researcher in the UCLA Anderson School of
Management, and a graduate mentor in the Academic Advancement
Program.
Next year Sanchez will have completed her coursework and will
only be researching her dissertation, which she said will give her
the time and flexibility to work with GSA.
Those who have worked with Sanchez on GSA said they were
impressed with her leadership ability.
“Monica is very organized and is a very good communicator.
I think she can do very good things representing the graduate
student body and their needs on campus,” said Nurit Katz,
director of the GSA Sustainable Resource Center.
Friends and colleagues also said she has the personal skills to
succeed as GSA president.
“Monica is the kind of person that gives everything she
has to a project. She’ll stick around and do whatever work is
needed to get the job done,” said Jared Fox, current GSA
president.
Sanchez said she has formed an idea of what kind of leader she
is.
“I ask students what their needs are. If you get a diverse
group of students, there will always be more ideas involved in
whatever you are doing,” Sanchez said.