SG campaigning comes to an end as elections begin

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TECHNICIAN

PAGE 3 • MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2018

SG campaigning comes to an end as elections begin

Kelly Granger

Correspondent

Student Government candidates were out in full force this past week using a variety of techniques in hopes to win over voters. Their campaigning is coming to an end, as voting is set to open at 8 p.m. Monday.

In this year’s election, candidates looked back at previous leaders for advice and insight on the most effective ways to campaign. Student body president candidate Jess Errico, a fourth-year studying mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering, contacted a two-time NC State student body president for encouragement and campaigning tactics.

“Tony Caravano was a student body president twice from 2003-2005, and I was able to sit down and talk with him recently when he was in town,” Errico said. “I got to talk with him about what he saw as being the challenges of the role, the areas that people are most unprepared for and how to prepare for them, and then also had that chance at the end to talk campaign strategy as well. He has certainly provided some insight to what it was like to be study body president and the whole campaign atmosphere.”

For Mia Connell, a student body president candidate and third-year studying sociology, a campaign on a much larger scale caught her attention.

“I saw Barack Obama during his first tour when he visited my home town,” Connell said. “He just spoke very candidly and he kind of tried to focus on speaking on a very natural level, and I think that that is something that candidates struggle with because they talk in ways that people don’t understand. Definitely seeing how natural he was is just something that people respond a lot to.”

Many of the candidates have found it meaningful to interact with on-campus groups and organizations by speaking at their meetings and getting to know them one-on-one. Candidates were present at busy locations on campus, including the Brickyard, Centennial Campus and Fraternity Court.

Student body president candidate Alberto Quiroga, a fourth-year studying aerospace engineering, ran for student body president last year. Quiroga discussed the fundamentals of campaigning he learned from experience and how he intended to use them in his campaign.

“Visibility, honestly, making sure your face is out there,” Quiroga said. “Making sure your voice is out there and that students know who you are. We want to make sure that we are visible on campus, that we’re walking around and avoiding being secluded in one area.”

Quiroga finds it important to not only increase visibility, but improve approachability, as well.

“We are walking around Talley, we’re walking around the Brickyard and we’re walking around Centennial to make sure these students can see us and they know that they can easily approach us,” Quiroga said.

Word of mouth has helped candidates make sure their name is known around campus. Student body president candidate Taylor Pulliam, a third-year studying political science, has been utilizing this strategy throughout his campaign.

“I think the best thing we’ve done is just talking to people, and I especially think that social media has helped a lot,” Pulliam said. “Me and Cat [Duble] are both very outgoing people with a large friend base that can vouch for us to show how much we care.”

Although campaign methods are important, candidates had to keep in mind the campaign rules and procedures in the midst of it all.

Board of Elections chair Anna Kate Whitfield, a fourth-year studying political science, is responsible for the campaigning rules, upholding an adequate structure of voting procedures and providing resources to candidates on an unbiased basis.

“The biggest one for me is expense reports,” Whitfield said. “I’m a really big stickler for the deadline, which is 5 p.m. both Mondays and 8:15 p.m. on the Tuesday of the voting day. I know it sounds like a simple thing for them to turn in on time, but if they are late then they get a warning and three of those are disqualification. They have a spending limit, so we monitor just to make sure they’re not spending more than other candidates. It’s just a way to keep it fair.”

Voting will begin on Monday at 8 p.m. and on Tuesday at 8 p.m.

SARAH COCHRAN/TECHNICIAN NC State students running for student body president, vice president and Student Senate president placed signs outside of Talley Student Union. Voting opens on Monday at 8 p.m. and closes Tuesday at 8 p.m.

Union Activities Board prepares for upcoming events, committee responsibilities

Emily Waddell

Correspondent

The Union Activities Board, the organizer of programs such as Pan-Afrikan Week, Diversity Education Week and the homecoming concert, is preparing for its upcoming installment of TUFFTalks and a new leadership team.

The board, composed of seven committees, will be undergoing a presidential change this upcoming spring election cycle. An additional 18 open positions will be up for grabs for the 2018-2019 school year, including executive vice president and committee board chairs.

Kamrie Risku, a fourth-year studying political science and sociology, currently serves as the organization’s president and will be completing her time as president with the organization’s current event installments.

“The legacy that I wanted to bring was to challenge what we were doing in a positive way and making sure every event was of the highest caliber,” Risku said. “I wanted to leave a legacy of questioning what we were doing in the past. A lot of that means hard conversations and late hours sometimes.”

Risku is preparing for upcoming TUFFTalks, run by the Speakers and Professional Development committee. The new committee is looking to provide professional opportunities for students and address important issues through its speaker series.

“We are gearing up for TUFFTalks,” Risku said. “It’s our spin on the TedX series where we have a guest lecturer that we bring in, as well as student speakers.”

UAB has seven programming committees, including the Black Students Board, Diversity Activities Board, Leisure and Recreation, Concerts and Entertainment, Films, Marketing Ambassador Committee, and Speakers and Professional Development.

“They all have a distinct way in which they program,” Risku said. “For example, while they don’t primarily focus on black students, the Black Students Board, they really try to educate on the African diaspora during PanAfrikan week where they try to foster community in that sense, while also educating other students.”

Risku also discussed the responsibilities of the Diversity Activities Board.

“Diversity really focuses on the broader picture; that’s why they have Diversity Education Week,” Risku said. “They can bring in as many aspects of diversity as possible while the chair can take on their own role as far as there being a group or project that the committee is interested in, while also keeping in mind how diversity is multifaceted, and figuring out how to broaden that.”

The Union Activities Board frequently hosts

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PAGE 4 • MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Caldwell Fellows celebrates 50th anniversary, announces class of 2021

Georgia Burgess

Correspondent

This past week the Caldwell Fellows program not only celebrated their 50th anniversary, but also named their class of 2021. Alumni from all over the United States and the world traveled to NC State to help conduct interviews and to attend the first Caldwell Fellows Alumni Conference in celebration of the program’s anniversary and achievements.

The Caldwell Fellows Program was started in 1968 by H. Smith Richardson and Robert Greenleaf when these men founded the Center for Creative Leadership and awarded grants to five North Carolina universities to start leadership development initiatives on the campuses. Of the five programs that were started, the Caldwell Fellows program is the only one of the five to remain actively operating and committed to the original vision.

“The Smith-Richardson Foundation got their money out of Vicks VapoRub, and they thought ‘we’ve got good money, what’re we going to do?’” said Janice Odom, director of the Caldwell Fellows program. “And they thought we need more leaders in the world that are the kind of people that we want to see the world developing into, so they developed the Center for Creative Leadership.”

The Caldwell Fellows program focuses on developing community leaders that will be able to serve in their fields of interest, whether that be at NC State or in their future careers. This mission stems from the program’s original vision when it was created half a century ago.

“They [Smith and Richardson] had this vision of leadership and it is still what we are based on: servant-leadership, which is not the same thing as service,” Odom said.

The program does come with financial support and stipends for the fellows, but according to the fellows and the staff, the program is not about the financial aid.

“I would describe it more as a servantleadership program,” said Kelsey Shevlin, a fourth-year Caldwell Fellow studying statistics. “It does come with a financial stipend and tuition support, but it is more a program than a scholarship.”

Based on these values, the program has named their class of 2021 this past week, which was particularly special this year as the selection activities overlapped with the first-ever alumni conference held by the program.

“It was our first year opening up the weekend to as many alumni that wanted to come or was possible instead of just the amount of interviewers that we need,” Shevlin said. “We had about twice as many alumni come in for the weekend than we normally have.”

In selecting students out of the pool of applicants, Odom discussed what can make a student stand out from other candidates.

“This program is not a prize for the fact that you have had good breaks and done well in school,” Odom said. “It’s really more of an investment in you, so we choose people that we think that we can develop into strong leaders with the capability to do that good, that really hard and well-informed work.”

Sam Fedeler, a fourth-year Caldwell Fellow studying physics and computer science, also discussed what the program looks for in candidates.

“We are not just looking for the individual,” Fedeler said. “Community is really important to us, so, for example, during our selection day we do group interviews as well, and I got to work some on that as a senior interviewer, and in that, we really look at how potential Fellows engage with each other because that’s really important.”

The Fellows and staff are excited for the new class and are looking forward to seeing how the community develops, however, the decisions were not easy.

“I think the hard thing about selection is it’s not like there are 25 more people on this campus that should be Fellows, and nobody else should be,” Odom said. “It’s like that’s where we draw the line because we keep our class size intentionally at 25 because it is a learning community and if you get a lot bigger it’s hard to do that.”

The program’s administrators are looking forward to the next 50 years and the development of their mission and values through the development of student leaders on NC State’s campus.

HANNAH SHEA/TECHNICIAN New members of the Caldwell Fellows and their families meet each other and listen to presentations in Talley Student Union on Sunday to welcome them and give them an idea of what to expect while they are part of the organization. The Caldwell Fellows is an organization focused on developing strong leadership and service.

UAB

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regular events throughout the year.

“We also like to do our recurring events like Chords and Coffee, the Trivia Nights and Karaoke so that students can consistently have something to really go to and have a community that they see every last Tuesday of the month,” Risku said. “We want to make sure we balance tradition while making sure that innovation is happening.”

Casey Brannigan, a first-year studying management, looks to her inbox to find out about Union Activities Board events throughout the month.

“I feel like I don’t really notice signs but without emails I probably wouldn’t go to as many events,” Brannigan said.

Brannigan recalled enjoying the homecoming concert hosted by UAB last October.

“I went to the 2 Chainz concert as part of the homecoming celebration and even though students had to pay for that, it was really fun,” Brannigan said. “A lot of people went to that and knew about it. I feel like a lot of the appeal to going to events surrounds the food, music and social aspects.”

There will be an upcoming TUFFTalk this Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Talley Student Union’s Stewart Theatre.

Upcoming UAB events can be seen on the online calendar found here. The application website to get involved with UAB can be found here.

ELIJAH MORACCO-SCHELP/TECHNICIAN Students wait in line for free popcorn before the UAB showing of “Thor: Ragnarok” on Feb. 15 in Witherspoon Student Center. The Union Activity Board hosts movies several times a month, some of which were recently in theaters, and some early release movies as well.