As the student government elections come to a close, we sat down with one of UNT’s most popular VP candidates, Owen Saenz. Owen is running for Vice President with his counterpart, Sam DeLeon, as president.
Briefly summarize your platform.
My platform really engages the student body as a whole. I mentioned how I want to focus on the minorities groups. Just for clarification, minority groups include race/ethnicities, LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, and more but I state that I will not discriminate against the majority groups at all. I want to be sure to give a voice to all the students. Racially, the non-white population combined is almost ½ of the student body. This is incredible but we need to take action to ensure retention rates don’t drop within these communities.
What is your motivation for running?
The way I will work on this is having Monthly Kimversations (conversations inspired by my friend Kim) that include topics normally not discussed because of their difficulty of bringing them up like sustainability, race and ethnicity, disabilities, LGBT community, improving our smoke-free initiative, campus carry, and more after listening to what the student input concerns are. These monthly conversations will allow us to better represent the student body by uniting people who wouldn’t be together otherwise. We are essentially making Idea’s Worth Spreading as TED Talk’s slogan, but through conversations worth listening too.
How do you plan to improve student life?
I also will focus on creating more traditions for the student body. Sam and I have been speaking about this by implementing more events during the fall and spring to bring people together similar to HoCo or Yell Like Hell. My motivation really comes from my involvement in SGA. My two years in SGA, I feel like I could have been given more or have been welcomed in more. If I have felt this way and am highly involved, I can only imagine how others feel. I am running to be Vice President for better representation and inclusion within the Student Government Association. I am running to welcome all people who don’t feel they have a voice. I am running to bring unity within the University of North Texas. Improving student life truly comes from being aware of what the students need. We are dedicated to visiting all categories of student orgs. Sam and I also having connections in all parts of campus so having students reach out to us and vise versa is much easier. Sam actually has a great idea that allows students to submit their concerns so we can help improve our stay at UNT better. I would like to see more town halls and student input in the changes that we have here on campus, a large part of communication needs to include the faculty and staff as well and we plan to work closely with them in order to improve communication throughout campus.
What’s something you would want your constituents to know about yourself?
Overall, I would want my UNT family to know that I love my University and I want to serve UNT the best I can for the people who come here. UNT is my home.
The first thing I would do if elected into office would be to call my mom and tell her the great news and then start preparing a timeline of all we need to do. We have our ideas but having a timeline will keep us accountable of the tasks we need to do and when they should be completed.