USG senators preparing for transition

Though the official transition period does not begin until April, Undergraduate Student Government officials are already working to train their successors and ensure continuity when the torch is passed to the new administration.

A recent amendment to the USG bylaws requires new senators to take a test on the responsibilities and processes required of their position. The test covers Senate meeting rules and bylaws.

Other positions do not have this test, so Vice President Ashlie Chan said she encourages the incoming officers to ask a lot of questions to be sure they understand their duties.

“For every other position, there are no tests or guidelines to measure if you’re ready to fulfill the position,” Chan said. “What they should do is that they should just ask questions so that they can have a smaller margin of error.”

Chan said that this year’s administration is taking particular care to make sure the transition is seamless.

“The main difference is that we’re trying to be as thorough as possible,” she said.

Chan said she transitioned easily into the vice presidential role because she had worked with USG before. She noted, however, that the process will vary by job.

“The responsibilities the vice president had were very familiar to me, so I think it was successful last year,” Chan said. “It depends on what position and what person you ask, but I think, overall we had that general consensus, and I just want to make sure that its very similar for this year, too.”

Some senator-elects said that it is difficult to come into the job without any USG experience.

Senator-elect Karen Tsai, a freshman, said although some newly elected senators have student government experience, many of them do not and can be confused about USG’s practices.

“Experience is really key,” Tsai said. “I think it would be helpful for the future senators to have knowledge about how things work.”

Sophomore William Wang, commuter senator-elect, agreed that the skills required for a senatorial position are learned with time. But he commended the current senate on its attitude about educating the new members.

“They’re very sociable, very open-minded and approachable, which cultivates our interest in the job,” Wang said. “They’re really helping us develop. They’re definitely doing everything they can to educate the new senate.”

The elected senators are currently attending Senate pre-meetings to find out more about their responsibilities. The current senators delegate their current business legislations and projects to the new senators so they will be able to continue those projects. The current senators are also working with Vice President-elect Nehi Ogbevoen to ensure that they understand his expectations.

“The old administration teaches us the key points in terms of how to write a resolution and best allocate your time,” Tsai said.

Residential Senator Tim Sae Koo said he thinks the transition process is going well, though he noted that a number of the new senators have been very shy.

“They don’t know what to expect a lot of times, they’re really quiet,” he said. “But they’re ambitious at the same time. They have the ability and mind-set to tackle the problems, so we really want to clear things up and tell them what their job is, which is to focus on their constituents and their problems and relay them back to USG.”

Another concern with the transition process is the continuation of in-progress projects. Though the current administration can make suggestions, the next administration usually tries to complete things that were listed on their platforms when they campaigned.

“Ultimately, it’s Chris and Nehi’s decision to finish the projects that they want and to start new ones that they’ve created themselves,” Chan said. “The projects that are lost in the transition are ones that they don’t want to pursue or are not feasible anymore … ones that are lost probably didn’t have a lot of weight or progress on them anyway.”

Some projects that Chan hopes the next administration will continue are improvements to the Lyon center, a new health center, security in the libraries, improvements for Campus Cruiser, heating lamps outside Trojan Grounds, making The Row a private street and extending Thanksgiving break, President-elect Chris Cheng said.

Chan said, although the people they work with will differ because of different availability of various administrators,  she and President Holden Slusher have compiled a list of administrators they have worked closely with and intend to pass it on to the next administration.

“I don’t think they are necessarily starting from scratch,” Chan said. “They are going to be able to go off of what USG has already established with its reputation.”

On top of one-on-one training, the old administration is putting all the important documents of each branch on flash drives so that they can reduce the possibility of losing files.

“The big focus that they have is to have a smooth transition,” Cheng said. “One thing that’s different is that they’re being a lot more sustainable — they’re digitizing everything. We were donated all these different thumb drives and everything is going on the thumb drives for the transition, instead of a transition folder or binder that can get lost.”