SGA leaders discuss goals, offer advice

Anu Parvatiyar, undergraduate student body president, and Brock Wester, graduate student body president, expressed their goals for the upcoming year at Tech.

"My main goal for the year is to continue last year's efforts with health insurance and the graduate student stipend policy. Last year's administration did a great job of completing their objectives, but there were some initiatives that carried over," Wester said.

"We are already working on our running projects, such as Six Flags Night and free student planners, and we also have two really big projects coming up, one being the integration of campus portals. We are moving to Sakai now, or T-Square, which gives us this huge opportunity. Not all of the professors used WebCT, so hopefully we can get a huge percentage of the faculty to utilize T-Square, and we also would like to integrate email, coursework, group projects, schedules and calendars all onto one large portal," Parvatiyar said.

"The biggest new project is an international and local two-part service learning course. It would be a multi-disciplinary course involving problem-based design. For example, you would study the problems facing a village in Southeast Asia. You would spend a semester in Atlanta learning the life, history and culture of the area, such as poor governmental structure, medical problems, resource scarcity, and would then spend the second semester or summer in the region working on them," Parvatiyar said.

The program is not yet part of the International Plan, but Parvatiyar is partnering with various colleges to work out the logistical hurdles of credit values and hours.

"One of our new initiatives is a professional development certification program, as it is possible to leave Georgia Tech as a graduate student having done nothing but research. We are really looking to develop a program that will increase the diversity of the experience of graduate students, with programs on things like mentoring, teaching, grant writing, even using certain software programs," Wester said of his administration's goals.

Wester expressed hopes that graduate students would become more involved with undergrads as well.

"I think that, as a part of the graduate experience, as a part of the study program here, mentoring and teaching are very important. Most of the graduate students getting out of Tech are going to have those roles, even if they don't go into academia, just in their professional lives," Wester said.

According to Parvatiyar, the purpose of SGA is "to represent the voice of the students."

"We represent the students, be it to the faculty, the administration or even the state legislature. My door is always open, and I would encourage any students with ideas or suggestions to come by and speak with me,"Parvatiyar said.

The same is true of Wester, who asks that graduate students come to him with problems or suggestions.

"We want to make sure the student body knows what we are doing on campus and we have a fantastic PR department. The legislative meetings are broadcasted on GTCN every week, and we are working to develop a program where I or my Public Relations Chair would give an update on what the campus was going through," said Parvatiyar about her efforts to keep the campus informed on SGA activities.

While the two presidents do have different goals and initiatives for the year, according to Wester, they have "a great rapport, and have worked together already on several issues.

I anticipate a lot of cooperation between the undergraduate and graduate executive wings," Wester said.

"In terms of the legislative bodies, some of the main issues were over JFC policy, and right now there has been a lot of effort put in revising the new JFC policy, so that both sides are happy, and it's my hope that it actually gets passed," Wester said.

Both presidents also had advice for the incoming first -years, be they graduate or undergraduate.

"Over study for your first test in each class. If you over study, you will either get an OK grade or a good grade, but you won't get a bad one, and you will know how to study, how the professor grades and more information. Basically there are no drawbacks," said Parvatiyar.

"Get involved on campus in something outside your research. Obviously nothing to distract you from why you came, but at Tech there are so many great campus activities and extra-curricular that it is very easy to get involved," Wester said.