Taste Cheese With Chopsticks

It is almost the end of a school year again, which at the same time means a  new cycle begins soon. A lot of organizations on campus are having executive board elections. Rachel Liddell ’15, an SGA presidential candidate, came to our ISO (International Student Organization) weekly meeting last Sunday. ISO just had our presidential election one week ago, which makes an interesting contrast.

It is hard to compare the  ISO election and the SGA election in the first place. Generally speaking, the SGA president holds more responsibility and power than the ISO president, so it makes sense that the SGA presidential candidates  have more platforms to campaign with. It is nice to see those detailed platforms, but I can’t help but wonder how much will be accomplished if any candidate is elected.

I’m sure that issues like having more local food in the dining halls and giving credits for summer internships do not usually come up  first  in the platforms of most SGA presidential candidates. Although it’s nice to hear about what candidates plan to do if they are elected, I’m more interested in learning how familiar they are with this system – how realistic are their goals. It will be more effective to learn from previous experience, but instead of having continuity, the SGA, from my perspective, functions only on a yearly basis.

Maybe due to the smaller scale or the culture, the ISO presidential candidate seemed to understand specific aspects in the organization better. Some of the candidates for the ISO presidential election ran as current board members of the organization and offered achievable suggestions and solutions that they wanted to pursue next year. There might not be that many exciting changes they wanted to make, but at least the voters knew they could expect those changes to be accomplished over the next year.

Rachel Liddell was the only SGA presidential candidate who came to the ISO meeting without asking explicitly for an endorsement  in the past three years. She has the best intention to hear what international students would like to see out of the next SGA president, and the ISO meeting turned into a Q&A session last Sunday.

One thing we talked about after the meeting was how political the SGA election is. Rachel talked a lot about her “platforms” next year “in her office” if she gets elected. Being an American, she brought her friend Danny Zhang ’15, an international student from Canada, to the meeting as well, to create a connection with the ISO.

That being said, the ISO election seemed to be less formal. The smaller size of the organization definitely contributed to it, but are there any other factors that caused it to be less formal? Is it that type of election process unfamiliar for some of the international students? Or is it the lack of interest of ISO members to participate in politics in general?

Personally speaking, I appreciate the good intention of Rachel to reach out to ISO and her concerns of the international student body on campus. I look forward to comparing how much of their platforms the next SGA president and the next ISO president accomplish by the end of next year.