My name is Daniel Brookins and I am running for undergraduate student government association president, as part of the Shark Initiative Party in the upcoming elections. I am a junior pursuing a double major in legal studies and philosophy, along with a minor in business. This is my third year on SGA, and I’m currently the vice president of legislative affairs. As a student government leader, my priority is to represent and advocate for the students of NSU.
The Shark Initiative Party is a group that I helped created, composed of 27 vibrant student leaders who have a passion for representing undergraduate students. We have four “Shark Initiatives”: increase Shark Pride, revolutionize the organization funding process, improve financial aid and improve academic advising. As a team, we stand firmly on the values of integrity, service, innovation and leadership. These values epitomize the approach we take as student government leaders.
Our first goal of building Shark Pride is intentionally broad, as we plan to accomplish a lot under this. First, we will make NSU apparel more accessible to the students. Students should not have to go all the way to the bookstore to get a t-shirt.
We will also continue to bring bigger and better events to NSU. This includes having an even better Waterworks, collaborating with the Student Events and Activities Board to promote Homecoming Week and implementing a new traditional winter event. We will continue the current initiative of “Sharkifying” the campus, such as displaying school pride, showing more of NSU history and continuing our efforts to get rid of the corporate park feel. We also plan to collaborate with the town of Davie to get Shark gear in local restaurants and bars, change street names to shark themes, put NSU banners on light posts and provide more student discounts at local businesses.
Revolutionizing the organization funding process is our second goal, but what does this mean? As it stands now, whenever an organization receives funding for an event from SGA, they have to put the money up front and then get reimbursed from the Activity Fee Accounts Office. This is problematic because many students, including myself, cannot afford to put a few hundred dollars up front and then wait to get reimbursed.
We believe that this cumbersome process chills, and perhaps even stifles, much campus activity, and we want to revolutionize it. We plan to implement the usage of Walmart and Publix credit cards in the accounts office. Currently, the Accounts Office offers one Publix card that organizations can use. Unfortunately, one is not enough, and many organizations are simply unaware of it. We would like to see the office offer more cards and publicize them better. This way, organizations can use the cards to pay for their event expenses once they have been funded by SGA.
Our final two goals of improving financial aid and academic advising go hand-in-hand. These two departments play an integral role in any student’s overall experience at NSU. From e-mail and phone response time, to the consistency of the information received, students have had many complaints with these departments.
This past year, SGA worked extensively to address student concerns in academic advising. As The Shark Initiative Party, we will continue to develop these relationships and work with academic advising to further improve the student experience.
For financial aid, we will build pathways of communication with the administrators in charge of the department to relay student concerns. We want to make absolutely sure that any and all information students receive is accurate, timely and helpful.
In short, we are The Shark Initiative Party. From us, you can expect more Shark Pride on your campus. You can expect a revolutionized organization funding system. And you can expect to have a better experience the next time you walk into financial aid or academic advising offices. I ask you to vote for The Shark Initiative Party via your NSU e-mail from April 8th to April 10th. Your vote. Your Campus. Your Initiative.
