Hannah Dong – CIO

What are your goals?

So one of the goals is to improve the design of the website, we want to add more interactive features on the website and we also need to manage the system well between the emails and the information and everything, so this is like our current goal during the last meeting.

How will you accomplish this and how will it help?

We will find out how to get more feedback from the graduate students and ask their opinions on the implementation of the website and talk to the senators about how to solve this.

How are you qualified for this position?

My background is not this, my background is apparel merchandise and design, but I really like the interactive design of websites and that is related to my background. I try to learn at every meeting.

Akshit Peer – conference chair

What makes you qualified for this position?

I have volunteered quite extensively. I would like to say I have been closely associated with this conference and I know since its inception how the things have improved and the people who have organized it before have done a good job, like this year was better than the previous year and last year was better than the first.

What are your goals?

I would like to bring out more undergraduate involvement. In terms of attendance we have a lot of panel discussions and people who do resumes and workshops. Many undergraduate students may be going on to grad school in the future. There were quite a bit of undergrads at the last conference, but we can outreach more and get more undergraduates involved in that process.

We would like to have more faculty involvement. That is something we have been disappointed with in the last few years, we are not able to get that kind of involvement, so faculty should know that this type of conference is happening. Not only by sending their grad students to it and encouraging them to present but they could show up on the day of the conference in support of students, which would be nice.

I would like to make an improvement in the submission of the judging process, make that more automated. Right now we are using written terms as the form of submission. I know how hard it is to make a submission because I handled it last year, so I know how much effort it is to manually maintain the excel sheets, send it out for review to two judges, getting the scores, taking the averages, doing all that bookkeeping is a hassle.

Do you foresee any challenges in this role?

Since it’s already on this particular level I’m going to have to match that.

Why did you want to be elected to this position?

I’ve already been involved with this for three years so I wanted to be in the leadership role and organize this whole thing and personally I like to make sure I attend at least two or three professional conferences a year. I like that networking, meeting new people.

Michael Belding – URLA Chair

What are your goals for your position?

One of the things I’m hoping to do within ISU is to make sure that all of the GPSS representation seats on university committees are filled but to also establish some kind of process where they share information with me after committee meetings. I just sort of want to get into the habit of communicating with one another, since a lot of committees meet monthly and we never hear about them and I think that a similar habit could be applied with the Board of Regents as an entire unit.

How do you plan to accomplish that?

I had a brief conversation with Vivek, the president-elect, on Monday about how he sees my role so I’m hoping to take advantage of his expertise, but mainly I’m expecting whatever communication happens to take place via email. Aside from regents visit to ISU or when the general assembly is in session during the spring semester, in most parts of the year we are not naturally in the same room.

Do you foresee any challenges in the upcoming year?

The main difficulty will be establishing habits of communication with committee people. I have experience as a former sections editor at the Daily and as a teacher here. When people don’t want to talk to you it’s very difficult to get them to talk to you. If they don’t want to talk to you they’re not going to talk to you so I think the biggest challenge will be getting them to talk about the work that they are doing on those committees.

John Hsieh – Treasurer

Why did you want to be GPSS Treasurer?

I’m very well qualified for it, prior to coming here I did my undergrad at UC Berkley in the degree of applied mathematics and right before graduation I was hired by one of the largest human resources consulting firms and I became an actuary. I was in the finance world for a long time.

What goals do you have for the upcoming year?

It’s already starting to get in motion in terms of better communication between the different sections or different exec members basically. Because of the way it’s set up behind the scenes, we are kind of all segregated to different positions and separate roles but I feel like we can somehow communicate with each other more effectively. That’s not within my realm of treasurer but I am definitely making suggestions with the vice president and the president in terms of like ‘hey guys can we improve the communication.’

Documentation and transitioning between committees is very poor and one of the biggest problems was the fact that we don’t have a central repository for all of our data. I’ve been working with the CIO to somehow keep the email chain alive so we don’t lose that information. I want to improve the entire finance committee process to make it more efficient and make it one well-oiled machine so that it runs smoother so that overall we can have a smoother transition from year to year.

What challenges do you foresee?

One of the biggest concerns that the exec committee has always had is when you try to fill positions for the next year and there are senators that have only been there for a year. I feel like if you have better documentation and better transitional plans then on day one you should already be thinking about your succession lines and of that succession planning. I want to allow smoother transition between treasurers so it’s not something that is not very visible. It’ll definitely make people’s lives better.

I’m well-aware of the surplus issue that we have, to me I think it’s an issue, I feel like if there’s a way to spend all of our money we should and we should be spending our student fees responsibly, but at the same time we should spend it because we’re not getting a whole lot of return.

Part of the issue with the surplus is that student enrollment is increasing so we are collecting more money from student fees, but is that really the fault of the GPSS? Not necessarily, we just weren’t prepared for this type of surge. It will mostly get used by the PAG committee because that is what is most utilized by the students.

What do you want your constituents to know?

The regular allocations, if we can somehow get it out there to tell students organizations to apply — it’s not that there’s not enough applications it’s that we encourage people with ideas to simply apply, communicate with us, communicate with the treasurer.

We want to fund you and were trying to fund you but if you don’t work with us, you have to fulfill your part too.

Bharat Agrawal – Vice President

Why did you want to be vice president?

[President-elect] Vivek [Lawana] nominated me and I thought about it for a week and thought I could do it and I thought that a couple of ideas that I’ve been having that I could push them a little bit with the vice-presidency.

How do you see the transition from CIO to vice president?

As CIO I was used to running the meeting in just the technical aspect but now I am actually running the meeting so in that sense I will see a continuation.

What are your goals?

What I see lacking is a direct contribution to my constituents, because it’s mostly been about the senate and senate meetings.

I think to begin with I need to ensure that we move to this new senate structure as we move forward. The challenge there is to have the department contacts understand what is going on.

My goals are primarily to keep up with the good work that [previous GPSS Vice President Cory Kleinheksel] has done because he really did reduce the senate time. I have to make sure that everything is going through in a timely manner, there is no way to say that one debate isn’t important, it has to go through but then it has to be structured in a manner that people don’t feel they aren’t being heard.

I also want to connect graduate students to alumni, because it’s a problem and there is a lot of room to improve things. An important aspect is the careers because of jobs and things like that. The disconnect is [not good], it takes a couple of years to build that relationship.

Vivek Lawana – President

What are your goals?

I’m going to work with the student leadership, mainly the graduate college because we do a lot of leadership roles and community service as graduate students and it almost does not get recognized from the university.

We are coming up with a co-curricular transcript which will hopefully have everything because if you are doing community service it doesn’t get recognized. I’m going to push for a community service award and we will hopefully have that also by the end of this year.

We hope to have a specialized group involved with the alumni association. There is no system in place so there is no networking.

The third thing is probably the most controversial and I will have to spend a lot of time with that but the time to degree for Ph.D. students, our university is not the worst but it’s not the best at maintaining this timeline. What I’m going to push for is a system on AccessPlus which will lay out requirements.

I would also like to have a senator social. The GPSS senators mostly meet just during our monthly meetings and it is a boring schedule and they don’t know each other and they just vote yes or no on items.

I also want to do a grad department orientation, that I can try to go on myself and that kind of interaction will help introduce new students to GPSS and what GPSS does, especially with PAG awards. I also want to maintain a relationship with student government. Even though our offices are only a wall apart, but still the only relationship we have is ‘Hi.’

Muhammed Wagulembe – PAG Chair

What are your goals?

The first thing is going to be to make sure that everything that has been successful in the previous year will carry on to this next year. The other thing is that apparently on the PAG website is that certain procedures for applying for the awards are not clear enough and it differs from the emails that are sent out. The other thing is of course to have effective communication when it comes to communication of the PAG travel awards and grants.

Do you foresee any challenges in this role?

I think one thing that comes to mind is the time challenge, but I’m very good at balancing my tasks. I think this is about balancing and with the PAG chair it’s an active role, week in and week out. You have to make sure things are moving. You’re going to have 30 emails and people are going to want replies.