ASUSU sets goals for school year

Have you noticed campus feeling more collaborative lately?

If you have, you can thank ASUSU. Increasing collaboration among campus organizations is one of five goals this year’s group of elected student leaders set for itself at its yearly retreat last week.

The other goals they have set are making USU’s campus more inclusive, encouraging student involvement, boosting Aggie pride and facilitating communication between campus groups and students, said Jacob Roskelley, ASUSU executive vice president.

“These are very conceptual goals,” Roskelley said. “So we started a discussion about if we met these goals, what would campus look like?”

The answers to this question ranged from having students actually greet each other on the Hello Walkway by Old Main, going around at events and surveying students about how they heard about the event, and improving campus clubs’ Web pages.

Tiffany Evans, ASUSU director, said the student leaders will “holistically work toward their goals” over the next two semesters. Roskelley said there will be a big push during this first week of school to give their objectives momentum.

Roskelley said the creation of an interfaith organization would be a part of making campus feel more inclusive. He said it was a special project of Student Services Vice President Gary Chambers.

ASUSU President Peter McChesney said part of the reason for working toward a more inclusive campus is the fact “there is a predominant culture here, and that’s just the way it is.” He said it was a goal of ASUSU to help those who don’t fit into that typical culture to feel they have a place at USU.

The next goal, encouraging student involvement, was chosen because each member of ASUSU remembered needing that little extra push when they first started joining activities.

“We had a great discussion that we could all trace our involvement back to one person,” Roskelley said. “As a council we shouldn’t just be doing things ourselves, we should empower other people to do them, too.”

Another goal, boosting Aggie pride, has little to do with sports teams and more to do with the simple satisfaction of feeling a connection to the school, Roskelley said.

To begin the effort to facilitate communication between groups and students, the ASUSU Web site, www.usu.edu/asusu, was revamped this summer to be more user-friendly. Club Web pages were redone more like Facebook pages, with profiles and vital information as well as options to post pictures or subscribe to a club e-mail newsletter.

“We want it to be a central location for being informed about events,” Roskelley said, “because every college student has access to the Internet somewhere.”

Other, more concrete goals were set by ASUSU members over the summer. McChesney said he has been working toward fulfilling his campaign promise of creating more scholarship opportunities. He said he wants scholarships that aren’t as determined by GPA as university scholarships and are instead more leadership-based. He said he is having an account set aside in ASUSU for donations that will be a fund for these scholarships.

“It probably won’t happen in my term of office, but the goal is to have one million in the account to set aside as an endowment,” he said.

The scholarships initiative has been his main concern, he said, though he has been working on other things, like following up on projects he started last academic year as HASS senator.

“This group has a lot of energy and passion and focus,” Evans said. “They have concrete objectives. For example, I know Peter’s mantra this summer was ‘Scholarships, scholarships, scholarships.’

“The overall feeling is this group is one of high energy. I think we have a real experienced, seasoned group here.”

-elizabeth.lawyer@aggiemail.usu.edu