Voting can be found in WyoCourses in the “Student Hub” course under “Assignments.”
QUESTION: What are your priorities and how do you intend to lead?
Brooke Culp – Political Science and International Studies
Cole Schliebe – Criminal Justice and Sociology Senior
So we’ve got quite a few priorities on wanting to expand the Student Health Access on campus. So we’re looking at mental health awareness, accessibility support, increasing enrollment, freedom of expression, just overall helping students have more accessibility across campus both physically and mentally, and just making sure students’ voices are being heard in Upper admin and being heard in their student representation. [Culp]
Some projects we specifically want to do is ASUW has upward of over $200,000 in our facility endowment. We plan on spending all of that this upcoming fiscal year and putting it towards different issues on campus, whether that’s lighting issues in areas that could be safer, whether that’s sidewalk renovations, whether that’s building renovations. One thing we also want to work on the topic of mental health, is we want to partner with the Violence Prevention Center and then also the students office and we want to work on redefining what it means to be a man like redefining masculinity and kind of breaking down that culture that men can’t open up. Also breaking down that drinking culture around about masculinity. You don’t have to be this hegemonic masculine male that drinks to fit in, in our culture. As for enrollment, what we really want to do is, enrollments have been decreasing since 2012, because of the enrollment cliff. So we’re projected to see a 2.5 to 7.5% decrease once 2025 hits because they’re just less students. Because of the economic recession. People stopped having kids so the birth rates have been declining. So our goal is to get students in those conversations. So we want to have students in these conversation specifically we want cowboy coaches, we want student ambassadors, which are tour guides and then the last thing we want is we want resident life coordinators and then also possibly representative from Greek life too, that way, those four pillars of the freshman experience should be in those conversations because they know A: how to retain members but B: more importantly, they know what draws students toward university so that they should be on those conversations. [Schliebe]
Kameron Murfitt – Political Science
Paden Knull – Petroleum Engineering and Political Science
Compassion is always big when it comes to leadership, I think a lot of times when people talk about one group not being heard or the other one, they forget that there’s people behind these groups right and at the end of the day everyone just kind of wants an opportunity to be at the table. But we also want to lead by example, we don’t want to make hollow promises. We don’t want to offer lip service and not actually follow through. So one of the big action items and actually doing outreach for us is going to these RSOs. There’s 300 some RSOs is on campus and we want to put ourselves in a point where we can attend each one of their meetings at least once, maybe twice throughout the year, to get to hear what’s up with them what problems are having if there’s anything we can do to help them and then having a roundtable to bring people in. So leading by example, being compassionate in our leadership and then just keeping everyone in the Senate at large to a high standard of conduct. We want to make sure that they’re putting out good work for the student body, and they’re also enjoying themselves. It’s a job as much as it is an opportunity to be part of the ASUW attitude as a club so give me an opportunity to enjoy the work they’re doing while helping the people that make up this great campus.
Gabriel Saint – Political Science
Joseph Rzeszut – International Studies and Economics
Well, I think we actually bring a different perspective to leadership. We’re both leaders of large student orgs. [Saint]
And we also have extensive experience in Residence Life. We were both RAs for two years. So we also think that that’s important because it gives us sort of an empathetic perspective to the sort of day to day problems that students face because we’ve actually been actively interacting and helping people resolve those for almost two full years or so. [Rzeszut]
But one perspective of leadership that we bring that we have seen lacking, and ASUW is vision. If you’re going to run a cabinet, a legislative body, you have to give them vision, something to move towards. And that vision we see is that yes, we’re government. We all believe different things in government. But we should all be striving towards unity as a campus and grace and charity. We’re all cowboys and cowgirls. And that’s what we want. All our legislation passed. All our stuff. We do as executives and in all relationships. We’ve seen too often ASUW pick fights with admin or the legislature for reasons you know, that I don’t think are worth sacrificing our campus unity over. I think that we should be able to sit down with people no matter who they are and say, Hey, let’s get something done for the benefit of all our people. Rather than just pushing a certain agenda. Our agenda should be grace, unity and charity on campus. [Saint]
And then it funnels into something that’s really important for us in terms of campaigning is that we really want to emphasize public discourse on this campus. We think that people of all backgrounds with diverse ideas and experiences should be able to come together and collaborate in order to make the university better. Personally, we actually agree on a lot, but we also disagree on a lot. So we think that we’re really able to take opposing perspectives and backgrounds and try and unify beyond that and that’s something that we’ve been trying to do in practice, both with our student organizations and just within the Senate. So that’s something we really want to emphasize. [Rzeszut]
