The Undergraduate Student Government subcommittee members shared long term goals and plans with the general council on Thursday, Nov. 2.
Committee Updates
Kitty Marsh, second-year policy class senator and chair for the student engagement subcommittee, talked about making the pep band club into a credit course at St. Thomas. The reason is to increase student engagement and to boost interest in pep band.
“We’re focusing on pep band right now to help boost morale for different D1 athletics, games, events, and so on and so forth,” Marsh said.
Marsh hopes to work with Pep Band Club President Clare Focht and the Athletics Department to increase the amount of sports games pep band performs at as another way to increase interest.
Commuter Senator Noah Peterson and Legislative Affairs Senator Samskrith Sriram, both members of the academic subcommittee, talked about expanding the language programs at St. Thomas.
“We don’t want to do something that most people on campus don’t want. So we want to start getting an idea ahead of time,” Sriram said.
The subcommittee is opening USG office hours for students to come in and share what languages they would be interested in learning, other than the programs already offered at St. Thomas. The USG office is located in the Anderson Student Center room 312.
Ilham Mohamud, underclassman residential senator and co-chair of the well-being committee, talked about how the committee wants to make menstrual products more publicly available for students at St. Thomas. The committee also wants to implement water cans in all bathrooms on campus to accommodate for Muslim students.
“I know that some of these goals are definitely going to be more long term and we’ll tackle those in the spring as well,” USG Vice President Jake Manske said, “I look forward to seeing what we’re going to accomplish this semester.”
Financial Updates
The finance committee will reopen club funding requests on Monday, Nov. 6 because USG has a remaining $19,000, according to Vice President for Finance Spencer Baker. The request period will remain open until Nov. 15.
After the request period ends, USG will distribute the $19,000 to those club requests.
The next general meeting will be at 12 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 9 at the Iverson Center for Faith.
Gwynnevere Vang can be reached at vang5129@stthomas.edu.