SA town hall features slate of uncontested candidates

Student Association candidates Solomon Ni, Alison Qiu, Crystal Unegbu and Yuv Sachdeva outlined their goals for the SA and addressed questions about their candidacy platforms at the Rice Thresher’s SA Town Hall on Monday, Feb. 22. The town hall was in lieu of the traditional presidential debate, as every SA executive candidate is running uncontested this year.

The uncontested nature of the election was at the forefront of many questions at the town hall, as the candidates sought to assure people that they were representative of a student body that has not technically chosen them.

Ni, who is the current SA treasurer and presidential candidate, acknowledged that he has never engaged in a contested election during his time at Rice. Their first position as a Jones College New Student Representative was appointed, and his second position as SA treasurer was also uncontested.

“It’s been really interesting to see just how much social media has molded to content creation,” Johnson-McCray said. “I started social media pretty early and I remember not having platforms like the Creator Marketplace on Tiktok or the Professional Dashboard on Instagram. Those two have really made it easy for creators and brands to collaborate and do transactions directly through the social media app.”

The process, however, looks very different now than how it was just one year ago, Olivari said, as student-athletes have grown more comfortable navigating the world of sponsorships.

“When everything first happened, everyone was very inexperienced and didn’t know what was the right price or how to go about contracts and things like that,” Olivari said. “But now there’s a lot of experience and you can have stuff to base things off of, which makes it easier for everyone involved.”

Rice has implemented a number of measures to help ease the process of landing deals. According to Marco Regalado, who oversees Rice football’s recruiting operations, the athletics department has collaborated with Opendorse, a centralized portal where athletes and businesses can contact each other, and The Brandr Group, which allows student-athletes to use the university’s registered trademarks.

Aside from these collaborations, there has been an increase in the number of initiatives from Rice available to studentathletes.

This article has been cut off for print. Read the full article at ricethresher.org.

“I’m glad that I took the [treasurer] position, because I learned a lot through my year here. I am disappointed that there is no one else running for president because I think that the best ideas are grown through talking with another person or a group of people,” Ni, a Jones sophomore, said. “But I’m hoping that [by] working with [the SA executive candidates], we can find some common ground and some common policies that we want to advocate for.”

Unegbu, who is running uncontested for external vice president, was similarly appointed as a Hanszen College NSR and then to her current position as director of government relations, losing her only contested election last year in the internal vice president race. Unegbu said that by advocating for more diversity and inclusion within the SA, she hopes to expand the SA’s reach and instill confidence in the student body about her own candidacy.

“If we’re going back to the same people who are already responding, then we’re not really getting anywhere,” Unegbu, a Hanszen sophomore, said. “One thing we would like to do together is reach out to … clubs like HACER, [the Rice African Student Association] or [the Chinese Student Association] … and just let them know that there are appointed positions that they can apply for.”

Unegbu also said that the SA holds many appointed positions, from committee members to senators to NSRs. The importance of appointed positions, she argues, should not be minimized despite the lack of an election.

“Even if we are appointing [people from affinity groups], I don’t want that to invalidate what they’re going to do because the appointed positions are just as important as any elected position,” Unegbu said. “At the end of the day, [the SA] is not a five person team … There are so many roles, so why not diversify?”