Your candidates for vice president

Yesterday, The Daily Princetonian sat down with USG presidential and vice presidential candidates. Today's profiles of the two vice presidential candidates, Rob Biederman '08 and Sunshine Yin '08, will be followed by profiles of the seven presidential candidates in tomorrow's issue.

Rob Biederman

In three months as a U-Councilor, Biederman has reached out to students by organizing Air Your Grievances Day and launching the complaint submission website fixprinceton.com.

"It's one thing to sit around and philosophize about what these 4,700 [students] want us to do, but to actually go out and ask them [is something different]," said Biederman, who drew up a list of 50 food items that have been added to the Frist Campus Center convenience store.

Biederman emphasized setting specific goals and reaching them. "Every semester, the USG should have a direct impact on students' lives," he said. "We should improve their lives in some way, shape or form."

He called on the USG to be more attentive to student needs. "Air Your Grievances Day should become a fixture of the USG," he said. "Let's make USG responsible and accountable to students." He added that opening USG meetings to the public is one way to strengthen this accountability.

Biederman has also focused on student financial concerns. He helped write the National Tuition Endowment Act, which was drawn up at a conference at Columbia to help lower the financial burdens of college students, and brought the act before the USG this month.

He has addressed eating club financial aid as well, having discussed the issue with administrators as a Priorities Committee member. "[These discussions are] where full eating club financial aid is going to happen, not in campaign platforms or with individual clubs agreeing to work in concert," Biederman said in an email.

When asked about the USG's handling of the Princeton Justice Project (PJP) resolution, which asks for student body support for same-sex marriage, Biederman said he disagreed with its approach. "I don't think that was the way the USG should handle potentially touchy circumstances," he said. "But touchy issues, like gay marriage, need to be handled in a way so that no student feels alienated or feels that the USG is ramrodding through or ignoring something."

Biederman added later: "No one knows, or cares, what Rob Biederman thinks about gay marriage, and the USG officers should never be voicing their personal views on behalf of the student body."

Sunshine Yin

Yin's campaign for vice president coincides with this weekend's launch of the TigerShuttle pilot program, which she organized as a Class of 2008 senator to give students free transportation to local shopping areas.

She said she plans to address similarly everyday concerns if elected, those "smaller issues that we might not think about, such as ease of transportation and dining in Frist."

Yin's focus on practical problems is in line with her stance on the USG's treatment of the PJP referendum on gay marriage. "The purpose of the USG is to influence the lives of students on campus," she said. "And although nobody can deny huge issues like same sex marriage are relevant, it's not in the immediate scope of USG. Nobody ran on those [nationwide] issues in the last election round."

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Included in her platform is the expanded use of prox cards, which Yin started promoting after learning about other colleges' student ID card capabilities at a recent conference of Ivy League students.

Yin said that Princeton students should be able pay at the U-Store, campus vending machines and Nassau Street stores with their proxes, just as Cornell students do with their IDs. Yin plans to promote the exchange of similar ideas among Ivy League campuses by creating an online forum for Ivy League student groups.

Yin emphasized the value of cooperation, which she said she'll rely on to resolve campus controversies. "The more important thing is to develop a working relationship with all members of the administration," she said.

The introduction of the four-year residential colleges is one example of a challenge requiring cooperation. "The USG needs to cooperate with the administration instead of antagonizing it and blaming it for creating a four-year residential college," Yin said.