Wildcat endorsements for ASUA offices

VICE PRESIDENT OF CLUBS AND ORGANIZATIONS: This race is between Andrew Steinberg, a political science junior, and Rhett Trujillo, an accounting and finance junior.

Steinberg is serving as an ASUA Senator and is most noted for the creation of SPAZ (Spirited, Positive and Zany), a group that gives out football tickets to students who do spontaneous and crazy things on the UA Mall to show their support for the team. He wants to reinstitute the Inter-Club Council and have bimonthly meetings which representatives from ASUA-funded clubs must attend. He also would like to create a program based on Texas A&M's "Big Event." The "Big Event" is where hundreds of students go out into the campus community and fix up houses and clean yards with equipment they get through corporate sponsorship.

Trujillo has been a ASUA Club Advocate for the past year helping clubs navigate through the bureaucracy of ASUA. He wants to create CO-OP, Club Outreach for Optimal Participation, which would make a more aggressive effort to alert freshmen within their first couple of weeks to all of the clubs on campus. Freshmen would be sent information on campus clubs and information would be directly distributed in the Student Union and residence halls. He also wants to try to consolidate the club recognition process and eliminate the rigmarole that clubs have to go through right now. As vice-president, he vowed that he would push for more club funding.

TRUJILLO receives the Wildcat's endorsement because he has clear-cut plans that would help clubs and organizations and cut down on ASUA bureaucracy. Steinberg's plan to revive the Inter-Club Council would only add to the bureaucracy and a UA "Big Event" would be nice, but more club-funding would be better. Trujillo's CO-OP plan is an infinitely superior alternative of getting freshmen involved than the current Club Week in which 20 clubs set up tables on the UA Mall.

VICE-PRESIDENT OF PROGRAMS AND SERVICES: There is not a lot of difference between the two candidates, Andrea Major and David Weitzenfeld. Both want to improve the ASUA Helpline and rather than adding more programs and services, improve the ones that currently exist.

Major, an art history junior, has been involved with ASUA for three years and is the director of ASUA Speaker's Board. As director of Speaker's Board she has brought Maya Angelou, Amy Tan and Sarah Weddington to campus. As vice-president of P&S, she wants to work on approving the Leadership Outreach program and she also advocates re-examining the salary structure of program and service directors.

Weitzenfeld, an accounting and finance junior, is the ASUA Public Affairs director. This past year, he spearheaded an aggressive campaign to get freshmen involved with clubs by sending them flyers and entering their names in a database. He wants to bring a leadership conference to the university and increase funding to the Campus Acquaintance Rape Education program.

The Wildcat thinks both candidates would do a competent job, but MAJOR gets the nod. She has had a solid track record over the past three years and she is a "doer." Weitzenfeld seems best suited for his job as ASUA Public Affairs director.

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