Candidates announced for UVU 2015 student body officers

Carrie Laudie | News Editor | @carrielaudie

Monday, Feb. 9 candidates were announced for the 2015-2016 student body officer elections. There are two teams, team Up and team One, who will be campaigning against each other to become the new student executive leadership of UVU.

The teams are as follows:

Team One:

Dylan Swarts – student body president

Phil Varney – executive vice president

Kylie McGill – vice president of clubs

Jake Larson – vice president of activities and student life

Matt Robins – vice president of academic senate

Team Up:

Mike Wade – student body president

Cristobal Villegas – executive vice president

Korey Sutton – vice president of clubs

Teresa Wilson – vice president of academic senate

Haelly Kirk – vice president of activities and student life

Team One’s platform includes four principles: pride, accountability, advocate and collaboration. They want to help other students feel the same sense of pride that they feel for the university.

“A well informed student is a prideful student,” said Robins. They feel that students deserve to have more information about where there student fees are going and what things are happening at the university. They want to give students a voice in any way that they can, by surveying students and trying to create clear lines of communication between them and different groups on campus.

“My pride in UVU just blew up, and I love the school, and I wanted to be as involved as possible. I really just saw the power and the difference that we can make in student government and I wanted to be a part of that. I love the rate of change that is happening at UVU and the say that we have as students. We’re one of the few student governments where the students really have a big say in what the university does. I wanted to be a part of that and I feel like I have the leadership skills and the management skills to lead the student body and be the student body president,” said Swarts.

One way that they would like to improve the student experience at UVU is by trying to start the process of having dorms on campus. One of the biggest concerns they have for students is that our semester ends at a time when many students housing contracts are finished. For many students that can mean moving during finals or being homeless for a week.

“We don’t want homeless students. We don’t want students to worry about studying for their final, taking that test and moving in the same day. This is something we feel we can make a lot of headway on this,” said Varney.

Team Up’s platform was summed up in three principles: accountable, empowering and cooperative. If they are elected they would like to be more accessible and transparent with the student body than any executive student government has been yet. This would include being more present and accessible through social media and also having their presence more visible in the halls.

“Our symbol is an arrow. Essentially for team up we want to go up, that means we want progress, we want change, we want growth,” said Wade.

Team Up would like to educate the students on different resources available to them at UVU by collaborating with different organizations around campus and having them more visible and present at activities planned by UVUSA. Team Up would like to represent all students and give them a voice at UVU.

“We want to represent everybody, all of the different ethnic backgrounds, non-traditional students, people who are affiliated with different clubs, transfer students. We’re trying to represent all these different demographics and we want to let them know that you can be a non-traditional student, you can be a transfer student – but you know what – UVU has a place for you too,” said Wade.

Team Up would like to build on all of the things that previous student governments have done, and continue to make the university better.

“We have the correct things already laid out in front of us; we have the necessary tools to get the word out. We just need to use it more; we need to be out there in the halls. We are the students who make up this population,” said Villegas.

Elections will be held over the next few weeks. There will be a debate held with the candidates on Feb. 24 and voting will be March 2-4 with the winner being announced March 4 at 6 p.m.