Good Evening Dr. Tsang

As you must know by now, unfortunately we have lost the elections. I was feeling pretty upset about it, like I wouldn't have the power to help the students as I'd like to. At first, I thought about contesting the fact that my direct opponent should have been disqualified, or the fact that the entire election process was manipulated and schemed by people I'd rather not mention; however, after reflecting a lot, I realized that the important thing is to contribute to a better community and not fight over a job title. Right now I feel that SMC needs good people to fight for their students, people that recognize the school's President and Board as allies, and not enemies. I believe we should work together to bring solutions, like I mentioned before, and I was finally able to put in writing my idea on how to do that:

I call it the SMC Student Shout-Out, and it is basically a survey—a massive survey. We have so many intelligent people on campus that could, and should, be contributing with solutions, but we are not reaching them right now, mostly because they have no idea of what's going on. If we really think about it, what's our main channel of communication to reach the students? The professors! They are there in every class, in contact with the 35,000 of us daily, and we should use that!

I understand that it's not every professor or student that wants to get involved, but I feel that if we try to reach all of them, we will, at least, reach most of them! I personally offer myself to go out there and ask the professors if they could do us a simple favor: tell their students, from all of their classes, for an entire week, that the school is doing a survey, in which they are all encouraged to participate. The question is: How can we raise money to fund more classes? All suggestions can be submitted online or in a form.

We could put people on the quad with the forms, so they could also write their suggestions. Faculty, administrators and pretty much everybody who attends or works at SMC should be able to participate. I know that most people won't take part in it, and we'll probably have a lot of trivial ideas to deal with; but this is a Shout-Out to the smart people on campus, those who can actually bring something to the table, and I feel it would be a great way for the board to show that yes, you do care about students' opinions, that unlike the current A.S. Office and Student Organizing Committee, you actually went out there and asked the students what they want!

The second part of the plan would be the organizing of all these ideas, and to evaluate whether they are possible or not. I'm still contemplating a possible third part of the plan, where we would ask the Professors to contribute again, by letting the students know that all the possible ideas are available to be read (in a very easy way) and that the school would like them to vote yes or no to each idea. That would be an opportunity to present Contract Ed again, but this time for what it really is, and let the students decide if they want it or not.

I believe most professors should work with us, since the purpose of this is also to generate more jobs for them. And from the students’ side of it, I can only think about that campaign advice you gave me last week: We have to repeat the same information over and over again to make sure they get it. A student who has four classes at SMC should hear about this survey at least four times during that week, aside from the posters and people on the quad advertising it.

That's my contribution for now; I hope it is a good one. Please feel free to suggest any changes or additions to it. I haven't forwarded this to all members of the board, because I do not have all of their e-mail addresses, but you are more than welcome to share this with whomever you would like to.

Thank you,

Taynara Moura

Moura is an SMC student who ran for Director of Publicity on the Hope, Experience & Change