Year: Third
Major: Computer Science
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.

What is your biggest goal for USG in the 2014-2015 Academic Year?
My biggest goal for USG next year is to increase the impact of non-USG members in initiatives, both by increasing non-USG attendance at committee meetings or caucus meetings and by reaching out more for student opinions.

Other campus positions outside of USG: 
Member and Bylaws Chair of Sigma Psi, member and web master of Solstice Acapella

Prior USG experience / initiatives undertaken
Member of IT Committee/Engineering Caucus for one year. Initiatives include working on WEPA, helping out with Engineering Peer advising.

What is the biggest issue you see your position having to face? How do you specifically plan on tackling it?
I think the most difficult part of the position will be getting student input on brainstorming and implementing new technologies on campus. It’s easy to get feedback on services that students frequently encounter problems with, but answering the abstract question of “What can we do to improve technology on campus?” is hard. I want to bring and encourage committee members to bring anyone to IT meetings that has an interest in improving the use of technology on campus so we can get a good variety of initiatives to pursue.

Many students gripe about how technology on campus isn’t always working (for instance NextBus, WEPA, bad cell phone reception, etc). What is your plan for making technology related services more reliable?
I think the most important thing to do is get these opinions to the right ears. We don’t run NextBus or maintain the WEPA printers, but letting the right administrators know if we are, as a student body, dissatisfied with these services can go a long way in getting them fixed.
Another direction to approach these issues is to spread awareness of why these malfunctions happen. While I know this doesn’t fix the problem, it’s a lot less frustrating when we know the reason why technology isn’t working.

What is one technology CWRU is currently not taking advantage of?
Something cool that I don’t think anyone knows about is the School of Engineering portal. This is a service that you can use on your own computer to log into the account that you access when you log into computers in a lab, such as the Nord Lab. It’s helpful for everyone, not just engineers, because this enables students to have access to all of the programs and files that they use in the Nord Lab.