Student government execs outline accomplishments of semester

As the semester winds to a close, we’d like to review some of our accomplishments and put an eye forward to the next semester. To start, we’d really like to thank all of you for being so engaged in many of our initiatives this semester. We’ve been very pleased with the turnout and the response of the community to our efforts.

We’ve been very event focused this semester, with the largest successes being the beginning-of-the-year barbecue, our first debate-watching party, our town hall, the football whiteout, and our election-results party. We hope that these events have brought the campus a bit closer together and have offered meaningful outlets to get engaged in our community.

We were involved in the election and the buildup to it. Initially we were planning to carry out a large-scale registration campaign, but instead we found that many third parties on campus had greater resources as far as manpower than we did. In light of this, we worked with those groups, looking to provide them with information to make sure they were correctly registering students. To supplement their efforts, we focused on informing students with our debate-watching event and voting-day guide.

On the more policy side, we worked throughout the semester to assist Vice President for Finance Jon Mark in creating his referendum to increase the student activities fee, and we are very happy to have seen the campus turnout and the student support to help us make this change. We’ve also met with several heads of different campus services to audit their feedback processes and will be reporting these findings in our end-of-the-semester report.

We’ve worked on various other committees; Board of Directors had successful collaboration, especially through the start of the semester with the barbecue and our elections events. For instance, Will represented the student body on a committee that is revising the university policy on sexual harassment and assault.

To collect feedback we have utilized our office hours and our town hall. We have seen positive responses to these events, and we thank you for turning out to share your opinions. Many of the ideas we’ve been presented with have been passed on to Senate members, as they are more suited to handle many of the issues that have been presented to us. Our slate was very full this semester, so we admittedly pushed off some of the feedback we received, which will be addressed next semester.

We’ve been happy with our public relations efforts, both digital and with posters. Through some unexpected complications, the release of our new logo and blog were delayed, but both will be fully utilized and distributed at the start of next semester.

We’ll detail these initiatives further in our end-of-the-semester report, which will be posted on our Facebook page by the end of finals week. This will go in detail into the pros and cons of the semester, plans for next semester, and details from our meetings with campus services.

Once more, thank you for all your feedback and support this semester. We are looking forward to continuing to serve you next semester. Please send us ideas for how we can better represent you via email at sbp@andrew.cmu.edu and sbvp@andrew.cmu.edu or on our Facebook at facebook.com/cmusbp.

Have a great finals week everyone!