Although budget concerns are in both party platforms for Ohio University’s Graduate Student Senate elections, the main focus of each party differs.
John Calhoun, current undergraduate student senator and presidential candidate for the hOUr party, said the main focus of his party would be connecting graduate students with each other and the university.
“Something I would like to focus on is building a better relationship with graduate student affairs through stronger graduate programming with the university,” he said. “I would like to work with other offices at the university. … Finding new ways to engage graduate students and new ways to help get graduate students engaged in their academic studying, I think, is the way to go.”
Current Graduate Student Senate President Tracy Kelly said the main issue her party, the Proud party, will be focusing on are budgetary concerns and campus safety.
“Those are among our two most foremost goals for the coming year,” she said. “We have some areas that we really wanted to focus on intensely in the coming year, and affordability is one of them.”
The Proud party would work to increase the amount of graduate student stipends awarded, which would help offset health care costs, Kelly said.
“It is important that we try to increase the subsidy enough to help with graduate student health care, just enough to cover some of these premium increases, because health care is very expensive,” she said.
Calhoun said he plans to talk to the graduate student body more to get feedback on what Graduate Student Senate should be doing to help everyone.
“I feel like a lot of grad students don’t know what Graduate Student Senate is or they don’t know what it has done, besides doing emails and the regular (public relations) stuff,” he said. “So taking 10 or 15 minutes to talk about what GSS has accomplished, what our goals are, listening to their concerns and bringing them information that they can use is essential.”
In addition to budget concerns, Kelly said she wants to continue to raise awareness about campus safety, especially in light of the recently reported sexual assaults. Lighting would be at the top of her list for safety, but not the only item, she added.
“We also know that there have been other concerns related to the structural safety of some buildings and some sidewalks,” she said, adding that if she were re-elected, Graduate Student Senate would distribute a survey in the fall to see what else the Graduate College could do to increase safety across campus.
“It would be really easy to do,” Kelly said. “But, what would be important, of course, would be what we would do afterwards with the information from the survey.”
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