Running for the office of ASUW president and vice president, are Roshan Kumar and Riley Quigley. Kumar is currently a student pursuing two degrees, one in international studies and the other in business, while Quigley is an engineering student.
Kumar said that by being outside of ASUW, their perspectives will come from a student aspect, rather than the perspective of someone who is active inside of ASUW.
“It will be more direct to students,” Kumar said. “They will feel more connected to us. So, I think what we are bringing to the table is our direct relationship with other students than actually having a position where we already know what we can do.”
Kumar said that if they are elected, they will spend a lot of time talking directly to students. This is so that they can find out what the students want and need, rather than going through the Senate. Kumar said it might make governance more difficult, but it will be more direct and democratic.
Kumar and Quigley bring to the table several proposals of what they believe will help students. They hope to implement them as soon as possible if they are elected.
Kumar said the major issues they are talking about are increasing safe ride hours, creating a new student emergency loan through ASUW and new Wi-Fi routers for areas that are lacking coverage.
However, Kumar said these will not be the only ideas they tackle because they will go to the students to find out more issues that plague the student body.
“These were a bunch of problems that we never thought about, or no one ever cared about,” Kumar said. “I think that is something more important and that is something that we want to include in our platform. We want students’ voice, we don’t want to propose something that we think is better. We want direct representation. I think that is really the main tagline of our entire platform.”
Speaking on transparency, Kumar said he believes there should be more transparency in the ASUW executive committee. Kumar said that they have had a lot of issues with ASUW decisions and their points of view and how at times, they do not represent the students’ point of view.
“Sometimes a majority of students didn’t agree to it, or maybe didn’t like what they are doing, but they still didn’t know how to approach or what they can do to change that,” Kumar said. “So I think there is a need for ASUW to go and create an open platform where they can show everything they are doing.”
Quigley said he decided to run for vice president so that he can give a voice to the engineering department as well.
“I do recognize some of the past presidents and vice presidents did come from the engineering department and it proved to be very beneficial,” Quigley said. “There is a lot of issues with the engineering department progressing nationally, happening with professors, with issues and some of them leaving.”
Kumar said that he is running because he has family in India who are involved there politically and they inspire him. He said that coming to UW was one of the best decisions in his life and that he wants to give back to the community.
