Associated Student Government Senate candidates, Simon Kaminer, Ryan Beam and Patrick Eleazar are running for four available positions to represent McCormick School of Engineering.
Students can vote for representatives of their own undergraduate school online at ’Cats on Campus by 7 p.m. on Sept. 28.
The Daily spoke with candidates about their goals, from navigating budget cuts to keeping bathrooms stocked with paper towels.
Candidates not featured include: Patrick Eleazar
These interviews have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: Why are you running for ASG Senate?
Beam: It’s pretty similar to why I ran last year. I just want to continue bringing fresh ideas and leadership to the Senate. I ran last year for a first term because I was excited to get into student government and see if I could make campus life better. I found that ASG is a lot of interesting work, and so some of the things I worked on last year were voting outreach in McCormick, as well as disability awareness and dining hall reform.
We’re advocating to the Board of Trustees when the funding cuts happen to try and protect undergraduate interests, as well as currently still working on the student entrepreneurship directory to promote student businesses and students supporting other student businesses on campus. And so I want to continue doing that work, like finishing that project this year. So let’s bring in more new ideas to the Senate. Now that I’m more experienced, I feel like I can do that really well.
The Daily: What are your goals as an ASG Senator?
Beam: Like I touched on before, just being a presence for communication, ideas and leadership. Because I think right now, there’s a lot of change going on in the University across campus, construction and president.
It seems like everything’s changing, but trying to have a strong presence of ideas and innovation within ASG to make the student experience better and uphold the quality of Northwestern just like we all came here because it’s a great school — not just the academics, but it’s a great community. So much to do, and so kind of keeping all of that intact and still going, that’s kind of my number one goal.
The Daily: What do you bring to ASG Senate that no one else would?
Beam: I think I bring different perspectives. I’m visually impaired, so that’s one of my identities that not many other people share, especially in ASG. So advocating for students with disabilities, especially visual disabilities, that’s something that I can do really well. I understand accessibility because I’ve lived it, and I know how to know what I’ve needed in my life to be successful, so getting that to students is really important. And working on things of that nature that need to change is something that I’m passionate about and can do well.
The Daily: Why are you running for ASG Senate?
Kaminer: Last year, I was a senator for McCormick, and I’m running again this year. For the whole school year I had the opportunity to participate in a lot of the cool things that Senate does, which is writing bills and laws, for the school and for the benefit of the students.
With funding senates, I was able to decide and help allocate which funds went to which clubs. I’m a sophomore now; my freshman year, I really wanted paper towels in the bathrooms to dry my hands, and they didn’t have that. I remember sitting down with a couple of my other senators and we all worked really hard on this bill.
Last year, when I got to school as a freshman, I realized we had no paper towels in our bathrooms. It was just hand dryers, which kind of sucks because when I washed my face at night, I just, like, had a wet face. I couldn’t really dry (my hands) with anything. So me and a couple of my other friends that live in dorms that didn’t have paper towels wanted to fix that somehow.
I was a senator, so I took a bill to Senate, and I did all this research on the environmental impacts, the health impacts, and it turns out, paper towels are actually more environmentally friendly and healthier than drying your hands with air dryers, because spread of germs on air dryers is really bad, and they use a lot more power than paper towels use trees. So it’s actually a win-win benefit for everyone. And the environmental committee on ASG saw that, and it was able to make it past them. That was our biggest hurdle, but the school didn’t do anything with it, so it didn’t go anywhere. But it was pretty cool to work on that and write real legislation. I felt like I was in government, so that was awesome.
The Daily: What are your goals as an ASG Senator?
Kaminer: I want to try and get paper towels in the bathrooms. But, you know, (if) that doesn’t work out, something I’ve been thinking of that’s cool is I went to visit a couple of my friends at Cornell before the school year started.
They have these things called ‘Pharmaboxes’ in their dorm/common areas, which is basically like a vending machine, but they have anything that you might need: Tylenol, Advil, tampons, pads, condoms, even stuff like that that, if you’re in a pinch and you don’t know where to get it. Simply, you go to your Pharmabox, and you can dispense it.
Maybe we could use some sort of mechanism, like your Wildcard to pay, instead of having to pay for it, because it’s a necessity. It’s something that all students need to have. So I think if we were able to work that out and create that, I think it would be really helpful. Besides that, those are two specific goals. I’m in McCormick. I’m running for McCormick senator. I want to be able to work with the McCormick Student Advisory Board to make sure that the dates and such for our exams — we don’t have a reading week — but our ‘reading week’ lines up well and is able to ensure that everyone in McCormick is able to get their work done without feeling overwhelmed and stressed due to the engineering curriculum.
The Daily: What do you bring to ASG senate that no one else would?
Kaminer: That’s a hard question because a lot of people bring a lot of different things to ASG Senate. But, myself, I’m from New York City. I went to a very diverse high school. It was all the way up in Harlem, so I met a lot of people growing up from a lot of different backgrounds, and being at Northwestern too has immersed me in that.
I think that my upbringing and my experience in New York has given me the ability, opportunity and a head start on being able to talk to, engage with and understand a totally wide diverse array of different people from really anywhere in the world. I think that’s pretty important when you’re working on a government group that oversees an entire institution such as Northwestern. I think that it would be really helpful for me to be on ASG because I have that wide range of backgrounds.
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X: @migtsang
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X : @catebouvet
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