Representatives plan to focus on housing, TA workloads

Three students won representative seats in the GPSC, and 12 other uncontested positions were automatically filled after elections early this week.

Results were announced at a meeting last night. The 15 newly elected Graduate and Professional Student Council representatives plan to focus their energies on reducing TA workloads, affordable housing and better graduate student health care.

The online voting was limited to the representative positions for the colleges of agriculture and interdisciplinary programs - as the other positions were uncontested.

Avnish Kapoor was elected as the representative for the College of Agriculture.

He is a first-year international graduate student at UA and wants to preserve funding that is available to international students who come to study at the university.

Kapoor said his biggest concern is with graduate student housing and wants to set up an online database to aid students in their search.

Karen Sweazea was elected to one of two representative positions in the college of interdisciplinary programs.

Sweazea said she wants to give the students in her college a way to voice their concerns.

She said there should be no teaching requirements for doctorate students in their last year, and a minimum and maximum number of TA hours should be set so that students would have a better idea of what is expected of them.

Sweazea said she is concerned about the current plans to build graduate student housing on campus near Coronado Residence Hall.

She said this dorm is notoriously "rowdy," and the need for residents to pay to park their cars would make off-campus housing more attractive and affordable to graduate students.

Pete Morris, the second graduate student who will represent the College of Interdisciplinary Programs, was also a representative this past year.

He said in his candidate statement that he hopes to build the graduate community and foster interest in the GPSC by making the GPSC constitution and election process fair and workable.

Morris said he also wants to work closely with UA to develop graduate student housing that will fulfill the needs of both the students and their families.

There are about 400 graduate students in both the College of Agriculture and the College of Interdisciplinary Studies. Fewer than 100 of these students voted for their representatives.

While the low turnout was discouraging, the online voting seemed to be a success, GPSC Elections Director Holly Mandes said.

The full election results will be posted on the GPSC Web site at gpsc.arizona.edu.

While most of the representative seats were filled, there are still seats available, and elections for these seats will be held in September.