It’s not too late to vote for President and Vice President of WMU! Voting for WSA will take place until March 19 at www.westernstudentassociation.org
WSA Candidates: Aaron Booth, and Joey Blasczcyk.
What are you hopes for the future of Western?
Joey Blasczcyk: Building on the past.
Aaron Booth: Enhancing the present.
Joey Blasczcyk: Envisioning the future.
So let’s start with building on the past.
JB: Our overall idea, or goal, is that we are trying to build stronger communication between students and administration. We want a a student centered university. We also want to continue growth, planning and development in WSA. We don’t want to come in and make all these changes; we just want to apply our passion and knowledge to make it better.
What about enhancing the present?
AB: We want to enhance the current opportunities already at our fingertips: academics, University pride, and the student assessment fee.
Academically, we want to urge administration to increase advising, also implement student academic leadership boards in each of our 8 colleges at Western. Joey started that this year as student affairs chair in WSA, we now have seven of the eight implemented already; we plan on getting the eight in and showing positive results.
When it comes to University pride, we want to make sure our students wear western gear on “Western Wednesday’s”, making sure our stands are full during games, we also want to work with the university athletic department to put on special events.
JB: There is also something called 100 points of pride, not many students know about that. That’s something we want to get out and display.
What is that exactly?
AB: It is just 100 facts that WMU is known for. For instance, Western has the best nonprofit organization programs in the nation. They are facts that all students should know about their university, and we need to update, enhance and distribute them to the university community.
So what about the student assessment fees?
AB: 21 dollars from each student goes into a fund for student activities. So ½ million dollars goes out to RSO’s and other programs without any evaluation or results in return. We want to make sure were responsible and ethical, and that we’re bringing in students opinions so we can get some facts about it—to know whether it would be good for future funding.
What is some other ways you plan on enhancing the present?
JB: We want to enhance collaboration between WSA and registered student associations, we want to reach out to RSO’s and collaborate with them to put on different events. We also want to bridge the gap between Greek life and Western.
AB: We have a separate portion for Greek life: invite, involve, inform. It is commonly said that Greek life has separated from Western and we want to bridge that gap. We anticipate feedback from them, so that we can do this instantly.
JB: We also want to put pressure on administration to better support Greek life. We want them to uphold the importance of Greek life. Right now, it is only 12% of the university’s population, and that is lower then most universities. We hope to work together with them and raise their enrollment.
Let’s move on to ‘envisioning the future’ how do you plan on doing that?
AB: It is not our only responsibility to think of administration, if we’re elected. We want to think about the state that we will leave WSA in when our term is over; we want to create long-term goals.
JB: We are specifically concerned about fighting for higher education funding. We don’t think it’s acceptable that the Michigan Promise was cut; that hurt a lot of students.
Booth, spoke with Granholm (two students were chosen to speak on behalf of western), so we feel very passionately about that. We really want to continue going to the capital and showing legislation that we’re serious about our university.
AB: Diversity and inclusion is also important to us. All RSO’s are diverse and different, so we want to take advantage of it on campus. There is a budget that can be utilized, so there are opportunities there, we just need to start working on them. We think it would be great to get groups that don’t usually get together to collaborate and put on a really awesome, diverse, event.
Check them out as our Campus Cuties this week and see their answers to some not so serious questions!