Grads lack Senate presence

UCF has more than 8,500 graduate students as of last semester, and only three of the eight Student Government Association Senate seats in the College of Graduate Studies are filled.

The 43rd Senate body is the second senate body to have specific seats listed for the College of Graduate Studies. Before the 42nd Senate, graduate students competed with undergraduates for seats available within their individual program's college.

"I was disappointed that there were so many open seats," said graduate student and senator Sergio Tafur. "I've always tried to get involved as a graduate student, but unfortunately the competition to get on to Senate when we didn't have the special graduate seats was nearly impossible."

 Graduate Student Association President Cecilia Rivas, who served as a graduate student senator in the 42nd Senate, said she wasn't surprised by the empty seats for a couple of different reasons.

"The graduate seats ended up kind of being a mess," said Rivas, who also described what happened with the graduate student senate seats as a ‘bureaucratic slipup.'

Rivas said that two graduate students, Stephanie Aaron and Austin Smith, were both told that seat No. 1 was available and, as a result, they ended up competing for the seat as write-in candidates. Rivas said this shouldn't have happened since there were a few other seats open.

Supervisor of Elections Shane Meckler said eliminating the specific seats concept altogether and changing the system so the most-favored candidate is elected has been discussed.

"As of now, that change hasn't been made," Meckler said, "but that's something that's definitely been talked about and I'm going to keep talking about it because that's something that makes sense to me."

Another reason Rivas wasn't surprised by the empty seats is because she knows many graduate students are uninformed about opportunities available to them in student government.

"I think there's as many open seats as there are because there's a lack of interest and awareness among graduate students," Rivas said.

Rivas said this lack of interest and awareness was made more apparent after the GSA received more than 1,000 responses to a survey sent to graduate students last year that asked them about a variety of topics including the Activity and Service Fee and SGA.

According to the survey's results, 47.8 percent are not familiar with the purpose of the Activity and Service Fee, 42.4 percent didn't know they could receive funding from SGA to attend a conference, and, after reading an explanation of the Activity and Service Fee, 72.1 percent said they felt that undergraduate students derive more benefit from the fee.

Graduate student Kurt Oster attempted to get appointed to the 43rd Senate last semester, but withdrew his application after he ran into a variety of issues including a lengthy back-and-forth communication with those who deal with appointments, scheduling conflicts and a fleeting flaw in the voting system.

"This entire process at UCF was very difficult," said Oster, who earned his bachelor's degree from Rutgers University. "I'm passionate enough where I will go through that process, but at the same time, I don't want to sit around the entire semester waiting to be appointed."

Oster said because of a lack of communication from the election commissioners, he missed the deadline to submit his petition to run for senate. When he was told to run as a write-in candidate, he found he was unable to do that for the first couple of hours when elections began because of a coding flaw by the IT department.

"If anyone had wanted to contest it or anything like that … they would've been more than able to do so ..." said Meckler, who said the issue was an "unfortunate incident."

Despite the coding issue, SGA President Mike Kilbride said Oster withdrew his application sometime after they discussed how he had a Thursday night class that ran till 9 p.m. during the fall semester, which is an issue because senate meets at 7 p.m. every Thursday.

However, in Senate Rules, Rule 7 – Student Senate Absences includes the Blanket Excuse policy, which allows senators to miss up to 1.5 hours of the meeting to attend a class for one semester per senate term.

In one of the last senate meetings of the fall semester, a resolution was presented that would increase the amount of time senators are allowed to miss of meetings.

The resolution has not yet passed, but Rivas said she thinks it would be helpful.