align=”right”>David Nieto just finished his first semester as President of the Graduate Student Assembly, the governing body for the graduate students at UMass Boston. Mr. Nieto has been an elected official to the GSA for the past few years, but that did not fully prepare him for the stress that being President of the organization would entail.
His most exciting accomplishment this year has been creating a “cohesive group…[and] motivating people to participate..[in] responding to students’ concerns.” Mr. Nieto partly attributes this success to GSA Program Coordinator Courtney Matto and Treasurer Alex Trachtenberg. Improvements could have been made in “increas[ing] the number of people that participate in our meetings and events, [so that] people…know who we are.”
Looking to the future, Mr. Nieto has great ideas for this semester. Plans are in the works to “improve the way we communicate with our graduate students…We have services that our graduate students can benefit from, such as financial help for conferences and workshops, funding for grad student organizations, grants for theses and dissertations, all kinds of social and academic events. And I really hate to talk with someone and hear: ‘that sounds really interesting, I would have attended but I never got to hear about it.'”
Nieto believes that the GSA must “turn up the volume” to make use of cooperative energy on campus, “and this includes having a closer relationship with [The] Mass Media as a way to publicize our meetings.” Nieto wants to make sure that every student knows who represents them to the administration, and though he believes that it is someone’s right to not participate, he thinks everyone must know that they do have a voice in the GSA should they choose to use it.
If you are a graduate student and you’d like to know more about your representative governing body, the Graduate Student Assembly, there will be an event on Tuesday January 29 in the University Dining Room from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Official GSA meetings are open to the UMass Boston community and take place every other Tuesday starting February 5 in the Student Life Conference room in the Campus Center.