These two Student Government candidates are focusing on the little things that will make life better for UT students.
Joshua Richardson, electrical engineering senior, is running for SG president along with Chison Liu, electrical engineering graduate student, who is running for vice president. The two say their campaign is a joke, but students are not amused.
Richardson said students have to deal with a lot of minor inconveniences that could be fixed.
“It’s the simple things that people overlook,” Richardson said. “We want to mitigate the number of tiny infractions (against students) that just add up.”
Richardson said it is often people who are involved with Greek life who interact with campus politics, while the rest of the student body is not involved or doesn’t really care. After participating in Student Government during his freshman and sophomore year, Richardson said he had to get out of the “rat race.”
“We have a bunch of silly ideas, which we would prefer to run on, but (our actual platform) is real quality of life stuff,” Richardson said.
Richardson and Liu hope to add feminine hygiene products and two-ply toilet paper to restrooms on campus, make printing free and standardized throughout campus, make dining hall food cheaper for students who live off campus, change the parking rules to be less restrictive of where students can and cannot park due to faculty-only lots and get rid of miscellaneous student fees, such as paying for certain documents.
“Because we focus on these smaller things, our idea is to pull more weight behind a general crowd,” Liu said. “If we show we are able to do more things, then people will have the idea that SG actually has weight and it’ll put more faith into SG. We want (students) to put their faith in us and then hopefully in SG.”
Richardson said SG needs to be more connected to the student body in order to make their life on campus better.
“SG is so far removed from the student body that I still have some friends who don’t even know we have (SG),” Richardson said.
Richardson and Liu describe themselves as the “zero-calorie, zero-regret” decision. Richardson said, if elected, he will hold off his graduation until next year.
“Trust us, we’re engineers,” the two wrote on their Facebook candidacy group.
