LETTER: How Student Gov Will Help You

By Student Body President Zack Golden

Student Government’s main focus this year is to define our place in the George Mason University community so that students know what we do and how we can help. One of the ways that we are doing this is to let students know what exactly we are working on. We have created a plan that consists of broad goals and outlined specific projects to support these goals.

The inconvenience associated with the construction on campus has been a source of irritation among students for several years. One of our goals this year is to help students deal with those inconveniences. Our Gunston’s Go-Bus project is one of the projects we have been working on to support this goal. Gunston’s Go-Bus is a shuttle that will take students to restaurants, malls, shopping centers, and movie theaters around the community for no charge. This shuttle is tentatively scheduled to begin running the first week of the spring semester, and hopefully it will make life easier for students who choose not to bring a car, allowing more residential students to leave their cars at home. Another project that we are working on is creating a craigslist-type website that allows students to find carpools with other students. This should also reduce the number of cars on campus and help open up more parking spots.

Another concern that we commonly hear among students is the quality of academic advising. Many students are not sure who their adviser is and feel that they don’t do an adequate job making themselves available. Improving academic advising is another goal for Student Government this year. We have two projects to support this goal. First, we want to create an academic advising session. Around the time students are signing up for classes next semester, we would put on a program where each college had a table and where students could go to their college’s table to ask questions about graduation requirements. If there was a specific department related question the college representative would refer the student to someone who could answer this question. This event would make it easier for students to get answers about which classes they need to take to graduate. The other project to support the goal of improving advising is to work with our administration to create a policy where advisers reach out to the students they advise. This policy would require each individual adviser to send an email to all students that they advise once a year so that students would know who their adviser is, where their office is, and when their office hours are.

Our final goal addresses the most common source of frustration among college students across the country- affordability. Although there is nothing Student Government can do to lower tuition, we can advocate for policies that make it easier to cope with tuition increases. Right now, we are working with our university administration to give students an idea of what next year’s tuition increase will look like. As tuition increases have become inevitable in this budget climate, we believe that it will be easier for students to plan for the increases if they are given notice of what to expect.

Over the last two weeks, I have outlined what Student Government’s goals are for the rest of the year and how we hope to achieve them. If there is anything else you would like to see Student Government work on, or you have an idea for a project to improve our University, please feel free to contact me or any other member of Student Government.

Zack Golden
Student Body President