Graduate and professional students represent nearly 25 percent of USD’s student body. They’re also essential assets to the university community, making regular contributions to scholarly knowledge, enhancing the classroom experience, and forming a large body of future donors.
This year, a group of graduate and professional students realized that, to date, there had been few opportunities to discuss and share the unique perspectives of these students. The group recognized that, although their interests and needs were often similar to those of undergraduate students, they were also sometimes distinct. This called for the formation of an interest group that focused on the unique needs of these students.
Since the group’s inception, it seems as if the Graduate and Professional Student Association’s path to legitimacy has been beset with obstacles.
Hiccups associated with our recognition suggested that SGA was hesitant to recognize the stake that graduate and professional students have in campus policymaking. It could be that SGA’s members assume graduate students have the opportunity to clarify their interests via the structure they’ve already established. Unfortunately, this isn’t true.
Historically, SGA’s activities have focused on undergraduate interests, and their structure even prevents G&PS from being able to effect any change on their own behalf; only two seats out of a total twenty-one SGA seats can be filled by graduate and professional students.
Graduate and professional students have a substantial stake concerning how the university decides to allocate its resources. After all, for many graduate students, the sole source of personal income is a small stipend they receive as a result of their work for the university, illustrating the importance of budget-related decisions to the livelihood of these students. Recognizing this, GPSA has slowly begun to pursue posts on many campus-wide committees.
However, difficulty navigating our interactions with SGA has highlighted the stake that graduate and professional students have in both the SGA and their leadership. As such, GPSA hopes to remedy these difficulties by being actively involved in this year’s SGA elections.
Although we would have liked either group of candidates to author
explicit plans for addressing needs of graduate and professional students in the coming year (and to make these public), to date, only one set of candidates has even so much as mentioned graduate and professional students in their campaigns: Tysdal and Morrison.
Perhaps no responsibility that GPSA assumes is more important the role we play in student governance. As such, we offer our support to SGA candidates Tysdal and Morrison, hoping that they’ll make good on their promise to engage graduate and professional students in their decision-making process.
With their own interests in mind, we also encourage graduate and professional students to take the time to vote for the only set of candidates who have pursued you support through GPSA.
Tyler Wray
Graduate and Professional Student Association
President
1 comments
One of the main goals of SGA is to bring people from every group and every college/school on campus to discuss their issues and how to make USD a better place for students--ALL STUDENTS! If you refuse to take part in this process, how can you accuse SGA of not helping you-when you won't even try to help yourself ?