Presidential Perspectives

Hey, Tartans. Since you’re reading this a week into classes, let me be pretty much the last one to welcome you back from break!

Adi and I have decidedly turned up the heat this semester, and we’ve begun by tackling quite a bit already. The major agenda item that we hit this week was elections reform. We brought a piece of legislation that has been in the planning and researching stages for several months to the Graduate Student Assembly and the Undergraduate Student Senate with the goal of providing a clearer, step-by-step solution where only vague rhetoric existed before. This change should ensure that voters and candidates alike never have to endure the same kind of elections cycle we all suffered through last year. As expected, there are already some revisions to be made to align our goals with those of your legislative student representatives. However, we’re still on schedule to institute the requisite changes by the spring elections cycle. So, while you may not notice it directly, there will be many alterations in the way elections are handled the next time you’re at the polls.

We have also made distinct progress on our institutional memory initiative. This process has been equally as complicated, and we have sought help from our student organizational leadership as well as student government advisors to bring the campus a tool that allows organizations to maintain knowledge more effectively. The goal is to allow campus organizations to continually develop rather than seeing a reboot occur every year when a new leader comes in, lacking several years of perspective guiding his or her decisions. And, for those organizations that have respectable institutional memory systems in place, the idea is to allow for a digital storage space alternative, just in case. In the coming weeks, we should be closing out the project’s interface design portion, after which the name of the game is implementation.

Again, I hope everyone had a great break and is starting out the new year right!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to e-mail me at cmu5@cmu.edu.