Ryan Roberts, a Near Eastern languages and cultures graduate student, ran for and won a seat on the Graduate Students Association cabinet for this year. Assistant News Editor JJ Yang sat down with the vice president of internal affairs to talk about his responsibilities.
Daily Bruin: Do you have specific initiatives or programming you’re working on?
Ryan Roberts: One thing we’re really working on is the Graduate Student Resource Center. First phase was just creating it, and from there we’ve been receiving temporary funding every year from Student Affairs. This year it was moved to permanent funding, which is what we’re really about. We’re really asking ourselves what’s next, to make sure this is one of the best resource centers in the country for graduate students.
In general, we’re working with the director of the Sustainable Resource Center to make GSA more sustainable. We’re looking at things like our Forum, using laptops and PowerPoints to save paper that will save two reams of paper.
DB: Can you elaborate on your responsibilities as the vice president?
RR: The big thing is I chair the Forum, and Forum is the executive body of the GSA. Forum consists of 13 academic councils. This is where the official business of GSA occurs.
Cabinet (which consists of the four GSA officers) carries out more day-to-day responsibilities. When it comes to voting something or taking a policy position, that comes from Forum.
A lot of what I do is making sure the president stands on top of things. I oversee all the office operations, and, in some ways, I oversee all the day-to-day operations.
We also want to get the Weyburn Terrace apartments as a member of the Forum so we can work more closely together. There are about 3,000 beds. There’s a large concentration of graduate students in those two housing facilities.
DB: What made you want to run for this position?
RR: Last year I was a member of the Communications Board. We oversaw all the student media at UCLA, including the Daily Bruin. We really got to examine all the daily media ““ to look and figure out how to make it work better.
For me, whenever I go somewhere, I try to make better the place I’m in. From there I wanted to have a larger focus and move to graduate students as a whole.
This position is a lot of administration, a lot of organization details, which I found to be one of my stronger attributes. I’m in a position where I can interface with academic presidents, but really work a lot with other officers.
It’s a really nice position ““ you get to see some of everything of graduate students as well.