Washburn Review reporter Neha Adhikari sat down with Caitlyn Crim, the new chief of staff for the Washburn Student Government Association for a question and answer session. Below are the questions and answers from that interview, edited for clarity.
What inspired you to take on the Chief of Staff position?
“I’m currently a freshman, and I was elected through freshman elections at the beginning of the year. I wasn’t quite sure if I was gonna do student government because I never did it at my own high school. I thought it would just be a great way to start to get to know people. I was just a senator my first semester. When Ryan Durst, our former vice president, graduated last semester and our special events director took the position, I was currently on the special events committee. So, I applied for the special events director position at first because I was super interested in that. Then right before they announced the position, the Chief of Staff decided to resign. They were looking for a new Chief of Staff; they asked everyone who had interviewed for the special events position if they were interested in being Chief of Staff, and I told them I would be interested. And so that’s kind of how I went into the role.”
How are the positions of president, vice president and staff members selected within WSGA?
“They basically just go around, and they ask people for their vote, depending on how many. If there’s only one group of people running, then they just go around but there’s two, then they have to campaign against each other. Our general spring elections are some time within the next month, I believe. Once the president and vice president are appointed, then we have Senate elections, where basically everyone in the Senate has to rerun to get back onto the Senate. Once you’re a senator, then you can apply for cabinet positions, and then our vice president and president will choose those cabinet positions.”
What exactly will your responsibilities be in this new role?
“When you’re a regular senator, it’s not that many responsibilities. It’s one hour a week plus the Senate meeting. But once you’re actually in the cabinet, it’s 20 hours a week, which is definitely a lot. In the office, I’m just managing office things. I am submitting P cards for getting money for different things in the office. I’m tracking Senator attendants to make sure they’re following our guidelines and tracking hours for our Cabinet members as well to work with our budget director and then my main role I believe, is just being a neutral party within everyone in WSGA, so I’m hearing sides from every single story and helping people navigate if there’s any issues. I work a lot with our VP and president to plan different things. If there’s any problem, we look at different ways and the best way to go about those.”
Are there any projects that you are already doing or you are planning to do in the upcoming future?
“We actually had our spring Senate retreat this Saturday, Feb. 7, and I did a lot of work for that. As chief of staff, there’s not a lot of events I have to plan. So, I’m trying to work on finding a Senate outing. We can all become closer as a Senate because we all have to be close in order to do our job.”
What is the purpose of the Senate retreat?
“Our spring Senate retreat was mainly committee focused since we’ve had so many switches between administrations, and we’ve also had a lot of new open Senate seat applications and people sworn in. So there’s a lot of new people on the committee. At the beginning of the year, people in the committees will set their goals for the year and what they want to accomplish. So that’s kind of what we did this time, restructure the committees and stuff. Then we had a couple of presentations about our future events that some of our cabinet members will be presenting at but it’s pretty low key compared to our fall retreat, which is more what is Senate based.”
You mentioned that you work closely with students and help them navigate challenges. What specific strategies do you plan to use to do that?
“I’m supposed to stay as neutral as I possibly can. So, I’ll be hearing both sides of the stories and I can give my advice, but I can’t tell them what to do. I think it’s more just being here if they ever need to talk and if they need someone to listen to them, being able to direct them to someone that can help them further, so that I can be as neutral as possible.”
What challenges do you encounter when working together as a team?
“I think, honestly, our cabinet gets along really well. We’re all pretty good friends. One of our great things is that we’re always willing to help each other. Sometimes it is hard when you have very different office hours as someone else and you’re not able to get in time with them. Everyone in our cabinet is very involved on campus, so they have many different responsibilities. I say one of our greatest challenges is sometimes just getting in touch with someone else, if we need them. Sometimes it can be hard to get in touch but usually we always figure it out [….]. The cabinet is just always able to get things done even if we’re stressed out or if you’re mad at someone else in the cabinet, you still get the job done and still communicate because this is our job; we’re here to serve the students.”
What message would you like to share with students about the work WSGA is doing?
“That’s a good one. I’m a person that has Yik Yak. I’m a freshman. I’ve just recently seen a lot of people being like ‘Hey, why are we giving them $70 for a Student Activities fee? What do they actually do?’ And I guess my message to them is, we do a lot more than people think. We are in, this week we had our higher education day. I was technically on the clock for eight hours. Even more technically, why didn’t clock out for the day? I changed my hours, but I was clocked in for 10 hours and we time out at 20 hours every week. I’m currently at 25 because I’m trying to get everything done because there’s so many things that we have to do and we will come in if we have to to get these things done. So it’s if you’re not in the WSGA, you don’t realize how much our members do but we are constantly doing things. It’s not that we’re just sitting on our phones and in the office just waiting for something to come up. It’s more that we are planning ahead for the next week, the next month, the next year. So it’s just we do so much, and people do not realize.”
That concludes my questions. Thank you for your time.
Of course!
The WSGA election campaign for president, vice president and senators began on Feb. 12. For more updates on WSGA events and activities, follow their Instagram page to stay informed.
Edited by Anushma Dahal and Bidhya Sapkota
