The voting for the New School’s University Student Senate elections started on Thursday April 28 and will close this week on Thursday May 5.
The USS is the student elected government made up of one student from every university within The New School.
There are eight students in the running to be elected onto the USS. Eugene Lang has two students, Serengeti Timungwa and Isabel Naturman. The New School for Social Research only has one candidate, Justin Petrillo. Parsons has three students Rhea Gill, Larisa Karamchakova, and Kiera Junghyun Kim. And for the Schools of Public Engagement Beth Windsor and Yaro Fong-Olivares are in the running.
Timungwa, a freshman, is the only student running who is currently on the USS where she serves as one of the three current co-chairs.
The biographies and candidacy statements for all of the candidates can be found on the University Student Senate’s website.
The application form to become a candidate was available online from Thursday April 21 till Tuesday April 26 The applications were planned to be closed on Monday April 25th but were extended because there were 22 people who started their submission form but had not finished them, according to Timungwa. With the deadline extended, 11 of those students were able to send in their forms. The application due date was also planned to have been on April 24 but was extended from that date as well.
The ballots were sent out to students to begin voting on April 28. The link in which the students were sent to cast their vote could only be used once. Whether a vote was cast or not the link would be unable for usage again. In the email, students were reminded to make sure that their ballots had definitely been sent before closing the window.
Last semester, Fall 2015, 493 students voted in the USS election.
The current elections were advertised over social media and sent in blast email to all students. For future elections, the USS hopes to advertise voting more and set up a better communication between then and the students.
Julia is the current Senior Photo Editor for the Free Press. She is in her senior year at Parsons, majoring in Photography and minoring in Art History. Julia is originally from Boston and is patiently awaiting her return there after college. She is a wiener dog and pizza enthusiast and finds herself most at home when she is near the ocean.
