What are your plans for this position?

“My plan for the position would be expressed in two major parts: to create a more active Information Technology (IT) committee and incorporation of more student engagement, which corresponds to the ideal function of our committee– to lead technological initiatives and to address student concerns.

As I discussed in the question for student concerns, I plan to bring our committee meet with students more often. Between our meetings, our representatives will actively keep in touch with corresponding ITS administrators to exchange information about student concerns.The other part of “student engagement” would be to inform our students of issues and updates, and educate students on how our information technology resources could be better used in everyday life. We have a lot of great IT resources that students don’t normally hear about, and I want to change this.

In addition, I believe that students could create incredible amount of changes with their projects and initiatives. For student projects, I would like to set apart a small portion of our available budget to help promote student projects and to maintain them. Projects like scheduler.case.edu were not only popular, but also very beneficial to our students. These projects should be kept alive and continue to serve our students. In general, we should be able to provide adequate assistance for students, when they need it to accomplish their goals.

In addition to the IT obligation, I will continue to learn about and discuss our campus issues as I have always done as a representative, and use my best judgement to as an exec member of the USG to make things better.”

Why do you think this is an important position?

“In my opinion, some of the main goals of the USG IT committee is to lead technological initiatives around the campus and to address student concerns. Vice President of IT is the front face and the leader of the committee, so they are vital for IT committee to carry out its major functions. Vice President of IT should be able to promote both inter-organization collaboration and efficient internal processing of initiatives. In addition, as an internal backbone, Vice President of IT is in charge of maintaining electronic communication and the websites of USG. With the position’s work, USG can communicate both internally and to constituents more effectively. As an exec of the USG, Vice President of IT also participates in important internal decision making process. Even it is outside of IT committee, I believe Vice President of IT should still be a representative: to speak for students and represent their interests.”

What are your plans to integrate student concerns into your work?

“Incorporating student concerns is my top priority. The IT Committee will continue to utilize the new USG Feedback Friday to gather student opinion on important issues. Outside of our regular schedule, one of the possibility would be organizing a student technology advisory board, where our representatives sit down with concerned students for several times over the semester to exchange information and ideas. In our committee meetings between these larger meetings, representatives will work on initiatives and then seek for feedback in our next meeting. With the “big-little” meeting plan, our committee should be able to finish initiatives faster and more effectively.

The other important aspect would be to inform the students of issues and updates, and help students learn about our abundant information technology resources. One of my thoughts would be to increase the ways how we can reach out to students in the future, like working with the observer, working with student interest groups and utilizing social networks. Listening from our students and providing them with adequate feedbacks would be the key for running our 2015-16 USG IT Committee.”