On March 28, Undergraduate Student Government (USG) presidential candidates Jesse Wright, and his vice presidential pick Kayla Worthey verbally competed with presidential candidate Gary Uter and his vice presidential choice Ignacio Chaparro over who should earn the presidency. The following are some of the candidates’ responses given at the debate.

As USG president, how would you interact with the people you represent?

Gary Uter

“Well that’s actually our main point. We want to improve communication not only between the students, but with the administration as well because I think they work together. As a university we need to create mechanisms that allow students to connect. One of the initiatives we have in mind is a town hall meeting, which will give everyone on the campus an avenue to speak about the issues that concern them. Also we want to create a student portal where all the information that pertains to students will be readily available and allow individuals to more readily connect with each other.”

Kayla Worthey

“Jesse and I are working enhanced community engagement along with high degree of cooperation between students and administration. You can’t have great new ideas without a great foundation. It is really important to work on having club councils with people, members of clubs and understanding what their say is around campus. It’s really important to take that into consideration. We have great school spirit; our school spirit is on fire. It’s just about making sure that people know that [UMass Boston] students believe in themselves and getting that message out to the community and building a community based on student pride.”

As “the voice of the students” what would your message to administrators be?

Jesse Wright

“My message to the administration is that the administration works for the students at UMass Boston. I think that administrators are very well aware of that through the interactions I have had with them this last semester. I have been able to sit down with administrators, have them respond to my emails, and make time to meet with me on important student issues. This tells me that the administration knows how important students are. They know they would not have jobs without us – that there wouldn’t be a UMass Boston without the students. So I think that is the most important thing for students to realize – that our administrators are here and they do care as long as we keep letting them know that we are the most important things on the university. That is the most important message we should send to the administration.”

Ignacio Chaparro

“I think one of the most important things to address to administration is how diverse this campus is. We are a world-class institution, and within that world class institution there is a student body that represents a diverse array of cultures. Within those cultures we can bring student life to campus, we can show the community at large that we can make change and a positive impact on the community.”

If there was one objective you could accomplish without any opposition what would it be?

Gary Uter

“As a poor college student, if I could push anything through it would be to increase public funding for public higher education. I think that is the obvious thing that any student here would want. I think in order to achieve any of these things that we are speaking of today you have to have an empowered student body. Change does not come from one or two individuals saying we want change. You need to get students empowered and to do that we need to improve communication. We need to provide individuals with the avenues and the ways that they can empower themselves. I think improving communication is our top priority because it allows all these other fundamental changes to take place.”

Kayla Worthey

“Facing no opposition we would ensure voting power for all student trustees. We are the students. I’m the assistant coordinator of the Black Student Center. I know what students want, and to not have the right representation with administration and on the board is unfair. So I feel that if we had no barriers to break we would make sure the student trustees from all the campuses had a say in what goes on in the votes.”

Voting will begin on April 2. A message will be sent to all UMass Boston email addresses with a link to the voting page. The link can also be found on the USG and Mass Media websites.