Easop ’13 outlines agenda

“I support Bruce because he supports me,” the slogan under the picture read.

Easop won that election, and the poster reflects much of his agenda now that he is at the helm. This year, he says, the USG will focus on building personal connections between students and their government.

“The theme I have been emphasizing with members of the USG and University administrators is the idea of connections,” Easop said. “Connecting students to each other, connecting students with administrators, connecting students with information and connecting students with their representatives.”

Easop assumed the presidency after upsetting former USG Vice President Catherine Ettman ’13 in a runoff election. Easop won by a slim 82-vote margin after losing to Ettman in the first round by over 300 votes.

Prior to running for USG president, Easop served a single year as Class of 2013 senator. Easop follows in the footsteps of Michael Yaroshefsky ’12, the first sophomore elected to the position since 1993, who won with an overwhelming majority of the vote his junior year to win a second term.

Building connections

Easop smiles a lot. During the duration of the interview, he never broke out of his cheerful grin except to formulate his next response. This ease is not surprising, given his concentration in politics with a focus on political theory, but his smiles are genuine and infectious.

Easop said he is eager to listen to students. It comes as no surprise, then, that Easop’s main goal as president is to make personal connections between the student body and its government.

This past Monday, Easop launched the new term in a fashion reminiscent of the Yaroshefsky presidency: He sent out a multicolored email to the student body — white text included — advertising a giveaway of free orange juice and bagels.

But in the same email, Easop also gave students the chance to submit questions for a student body-generated “personal interview with the new USG president,” furthering his goal of increased connections.

To that end, Easop also created a new USG position called the Student Engagement chair, whose role will be to “make sure we are focused on student engagement throughout the year,” he said.

Easop said he wants connections and communication to go beyond “just surveys” during his presidency. He said he wants to show “that the USG has a human face and that student input is involved throughout the process of pursuing projects, not just identifying which projects should be pursued.”

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To facilitate this, Easop explained that he hopes to create once-a-month town hall meetings with the student body.

Easop also intends to create a new TigerApp website called Tiger2Tiger.com, which he hopes will provide an opportunity for students to connect with each other. Easop said he envisions individual class governments managing this project.

“Each grade has its own set of challenges and its own central decisions to be made,” Easop said.

At the moment, however, Easop said that in the early stages of the new government, the USG will primarily focus on continuing projects from last term, as well as streamlining internal processes.

“Increasing transparency, developing more clear ways of evaluating projects and setting goals early on will make pursuing future projects more possible in the coming year,” Easop said.

A focus on mental health

Easop said he hopes to increase awareness of the University’s mental health services.

One of his ideas is to oversee the creation of an iPhone app that would allow students easier access to mental health resources. The intention is to give students advice on how to be a good friend to people suffering from mental health issues and inform them how to provide help.

Easop explained that he hopes to create an advisory board for student psychological services that would consist of students and faculty and would be responsible for investigating whether student mental health needs are being met.

Additionally, Easop said he intends to hold a mental health awareness week during the spring term.

“Publicity and visibility will be the focus moving forward on the project,” Easop said.

Publicizing academic information

In addition to mental health issues, Easop said, many of the long-term projects he plans to pursue aim to create frameworks to centralize information on the resources the University offers to its students.

He said he hopes to revitalize the work the USG has already done in other spheres, such as the Student Course Guide. Easop said that the SCG “has started to lag and has not been comprehensively updated in some time.”

For example, the improved course guide would provide more comparisons between courses within a given major. Additionally, Easop said that he wants to improve the SCG surveys and differentiate them from the SCORE evaluations that students complete at the end of each term.

“The way we need to think about it is ‘What are the questions that you ask when you are deciding on a course that aren’t necessarily answered by SCORE?’ ” Easop said.

Easop said that the SCG should address questions such as the applicability of a course to future courses as well as careers or graduate school. Additionally, he would like the SCG evaluations to ask students what “unofficial prerequisites” are useful. The SCORE surveys don’t ask these sort of questions, he said.

Easop also explained that he intends to work with academics chair Steven Rosen ’13 to start fall term classes on the Wednesday of the first week.

“To me it’s a win-win,” Easop explained. “It extends the shopping period to include Monday/Wednesday classes while allowing students to not have to skip courses to make a flight on the Wednesday of Thanksgiving.”

Easop said that he didn’t want to make any promises at the onset of his presidency, but noted that in the coming year he hoped to make progress where student and University interests were aligned.

“The challenge for any student government is identifying and capitalizing on areas where the student interest and the university’s goals come together,” he said.

Easop explained that he had already interacted with Vice President for Campus Life Cynthia Cherrey and Dean of the College Valerie Smith. He said there will be opportunities to work together.

“They have done a great job so far of listening to the students and developing their priorities based on the feedback they’ve received from the students and faculty, so hopefully we will be able to transition on the shared interests and capitalize some of the shared interests into tangible goals,” he said.

Easop said it was important to him that the USG be able to represent student interests to the administration with regard to school policy. The results from the Academic Life Total Assessment, which will register student opinion on academic policy, are planned to be released this spring.

Additionally, this semester the administration intends to release the final recommendations on how to implement the ban on freshman rush, and Easop believes that there is an important role for the USG to play in this process.

“The main role of the USG at the moment is to make sure that there is feedback from the students to consider,” Easop said.

While there may not be white text at the end of his emails, many of Easop’s goals represent extensions of Yaroshefsky’s accomplishments. Yet he has also added a full slate of his own goals, notably increasing awareness of mental health issues on campus.

Following in the footsteps of a two-year presidency, Easop will have relatively little time to bring these goals to fruition. Yet by aiming to improve communication and transparency, Easop said he hopes to lay a long-lasting framework for a USG that is more connected to the student body.