The new president and vice president for Graduate and Professional Student Senate are looking to better serve graduate and professional students for next year.

Arko Mukherjee, this year’s GPSS chief information adviser and next year’s GPSS President, is already brainstorming ways to better serve the graduate and professional students for this upcoming school year.

“As the chief information officer, I was only serving GPSS, which of course in turn, serves the graduate students but now I want to serve graduate students even more directly,” said Mukherjee.

The first of the ideas that Mukherjee is looking in to is better utilizing career fairs for graduate and professional students. The feedback that Mukherjee has received about Iowa State’s career fairs is that the current fairs are not well suited for graduate and professional students. Career fairs seem to be more directed toward undergraduates, Mukherjee said. 

Zachary Zenko, graduate student in kinesiology, and next year’s vice president, said he is also looking forward to making a difference for graduate student in the upcoming year.

“I am excited to see what the future brings compared to the previous year. This year’s senate has been much more active and more passionate and many things are getting done. The graduate and professional student body is more aware of what we do, and I just encourage people to get involved and be more active,” said Zenko.

Another thing on Mukherjee’s mind is housing for graduate and professional students. He said that the number of graduate students is said to increase by 40 percent by 2017. A couple of his main concerns are increasing cost in rent and the lack of apartment availability.

“I want to see what other policies that the university can encourage, maybe we should think of graduate student housing,” said Mukherjee.

Another idea that Mukherjee said he has already been working on is making applying for funds easier for graduate students.

Graduate students can apply for funds for support for traveling to events such as professional conferences. Mukherjee plans to eliminate the current paper work process all together and move applications online to make applying more accessible to students. 

“I think GPSS has really shot up in the past year we’ve done a lot of new things, we had a research conference and started graduate student orientation.There are a lot of new things that are coming up, and I’m really excited about them,” said Mukherjee.

Mukherjee’s ultimate goal is not only to better serve the graduate and professional students but also to keep increasing student interest in the GPSS.

“I think GPSS is slowly starting to make an impact in the lives of graduate students that they can see and that is tangible to them, and I see a lot more graduate students interested in GPSS than what it was when I came here initially,” Mukherjee said.

Arko said he wants to further increase graduate and professional student knowledge and participation in the student government, because he feel students must take an interest into the governing body so that it can remain democratic.

“It will be my last year with the GPSS so I definitely want to make it a good one,” said Zenko.