Bringing focus to a wide variety of campus niches, candidates Michelle Lyon, Christina Colosimo and Jesse Rogel will provide the best leadership for the general representative offices.
These candidates have the appropriate experience to prove their efficacy and bring forward plans for representation of groups and ideas that have long been neglected by the Undergraduate Students Association Council.
Lyon, a candidate with Bruins United, has positive proposals aimed at serving all students through the expansion and reorganization of various programs already in place.
The most compelling idea Lyon put forth is alternative spring breaks, where students will have the opportunity to travel and provide disaster relief or other aid in a secular program. She has already investigated the implementation of this program and shown its feasibility.
Her program for the expansion of Student Psychological Services to the Hill and the reorganization of the Student Research Program’s Web site are also very promising.
In regard to the former, she has already made contact with SPS Director of Outreach Brianne Amato and looks to utilize Covel Commons and other residential facilities to host a variety of mental health programs.
For the latter, Lyon plans to revamp the Student Research Program in order to increase accessibility and offer better solutions for professors seeking research assistants.
Lyon has the vision and preparation to achieve her goals.
Colosimo, another Bruins United candidate, provides a particularly strong vision for South Campus students and transfer students, groups long overlooked by much of the council.
To start, she looks to expand funding workshops for student groups in order to provide them with the information and help they need to obtain funding from the Student Organizations Operations Fund. Also, her plan to put Student Government Accounting online would eliminate much of the red tape involved with obtaining funds.
For South Campus students, Colosimo seeks to develop mid-quarter evaluations for professors and teaching assistants, something she says students have asked for and administrators have approved. For transfer students, she looks to expand UCLA orientation services in order to inform them more adequately.
In general, Colosimo’s plans, enthusiasm and experience will provide a great deal of representation not offered to these groups in the past.
Rogel, the third Bruins United candidate, has less in the way of inspiring plans but has shown himself to have the relevant experience and enough specificity to follow through with his ideas.
His largest program is a new Student Advocate Office, which he projects will offer students help with a variety of problems, including academic disputes and legal rights.
We like his plans for shuttle services to Los Angeles International Airport and Union Station, and we approve of increased funding for groups seeking to improve minority yield at UCLA. These are positive steps that will serve current students and future students alike.
Rogel, however, has several underdeveloped ideas in regard to bringing more healthy foods to UCLA, both on the Hill and within Associated Students UCLA facilities, but his experience as chief of staff for the USAC President’s Office indicates he will be organized and can therefore be effective in pursuing his ideas.
The other two candidates, Mae Cauguiran and Sanobar Sajan from Students First!, fail to provide any significant planning, direction or innovation in their ideas.
Sajan does not provide any new ideas and outlines plans for coalitions without tangible goals.
She looks to continue the Social Justice Speaker Series in an attempt to combat student apathy, but she shows no concrete ideas for how to expand the scope of the series to include more students or speakers.
Sajan’s plans to create a women’s advocacy coalition and an interfaith coalition lack any real foresight as to how these groups can effect real change on campus. Further, she did not convince us that she could get the divergent views of those in these coalitions to mesh, seemingly assuming that they will join together simply because they are all religious or all women.
Cauguiran, who comes in as the Editorial Board’s last choice for general representative, displayed a disappointing lack of understanding of all her platform items.
Though she provides ideas that seem promising, such as the establishment of apartment reviews on bruinwalk.com, she produces unconvincing explanations of whether these are feasible ideas and showed herself to be largely uninformed about the processes by which these goals could be achieved.