Candidate Interviews - Tom and Blake (Part 1 of 2)

Q: Why run for president? What makes you the most qualified candidate for the position?

Tom: I really love UNI. I didn't hear about UNI until I was about a junior in high school, when my sister came here and I visited her. I fell in love with it, and everything just fell into place. And now my brother is here and my younger sister, who will be a freshman in high school, she also talks about going to UNI. So our family has really grown to love this school and I want to make sure that my college experience, which has been awesome and amazing, is better for my siblings and all the incoming students, so that when they graduate they too can say their experience was amazing. Teachers and faculty have been great and together they can make a really great school, but it's the students that really make this school excellent and really help make UNI home. So I really want to do whatever I can to give back to UNI and the students, and being president is the perfect way to do that. Qualifications-wise, I've been involved in such a wide variety of different organizations on campus -- Student Admissions Ambassadors, Circle K, Camp Adventure, ROTC -- so I've had a lot of experiences with a wide variety of different students. I've seen almost the full spectrum of students, so I've heard a lot of different opinions and with that I've gained a lot of skills through different organizations that I feel make me qualified for the job.

Q: Why Blake? What was it about him that made him the ideal running mate?

Tom: Blake and I, we sat on senate together and we were also roommates. But really, what hit me was we were sitting in a senate meeting -- and we always sat next to each other and we spent a lot of time talking to each other and debating the different issues of senate -- and the thing that really got me was that sometimes we'd disagree and he wasn't afraid to disagree with me, which was really big. You know, I don't want someone that is going to agree with me on everything. But along with that, Blake is extremely qualified. He has been in senate now for almost three years, he has been the head of all sorts of different committees, he works for the Northern Iowan and he has developed really good relationships with faculty. I don't know a single faculty member that does not respect Blake Findley for all that he has done, which is really important with a vice presidential candidate. Not only that, but he is a great friend. We kind of balance each other out. His weaknesses are my strengths and his strengths are my weaknesses, and we keep each other in line and we keep each other sane. He challenges me to do my best and even when there is something that I think might be good, he is always there to ask how it could be better and to really push me forward to make a better platform and hopefully a better student body president.

Q: You've narrowed down your platform into three basic ideas: transparency, sustainability and inclusivity. Why those three? What was the thinking behind that?

Tom: We really didn't want a huge platform. We really want to do stuff that can actually be accomplished. We're not going to go around to all these different studnets and make promises we know we can't get done. So we really wanted to narrow it down and simplify it for students so it's easy for everyone to understand. Our first one, of course, is accessibility. The biggest problem with NISG is that students really don't know what NISG is. Students don't know who we are, students don't know what we do, and most importantly students don't know how we can benefit them. That's where the website comes in. Making it more accessible and easy, more how-to on how students get funds from us. To go along with sustainability, right now UNI is at a gold level, and we really want to get to that platinum level. No other school, to my knowledge, has been to that platinum level, and being environmentally conscious is a really big thing that is going to be coming up with a lot of younger generations. Recycling is a really easy thing we can do to get students to think about the Earth. Now, there is tons of recycling in the Union and there is tons of recycling in the dorm rooms, but there are a lot of buildings that don't have recycling. So we want to make sure that recycling gets in those buildings. even though it might be a little bit of extra work for the custodians. Also, move-in and move-out days, there are a lot of boxes students bring and paperwork that gets thrown away. It's a wasted opportunity. We've talked to the city of Cedar Falls, who would gladly bring their own recycling dumpsters to the different dorm rooms where students can recycle all their stuff. And probably one of our favorite things when it comes to sustainability is our Adopt-A-Garden program. The top of the Union, in my personal opinion, is not very appealing for students. Students don't really go up there and study, which is a waste. So what we would like to do is open up that space for students to adopt gardens and make it more environmentally friendly by putting up plants and making it really pretty. With inclusivity, it's another big that we're always trying to look into. I feel like in recent years, the word diversity has been used a lot and I feel like it has been used so much that it leaves out a lot of certain students groups. For instance, I feel like the LGBT community, Veterans Affairs and Disabilities Services are always left out. Those are three big groups that we really want to focus on.

Q: I noticed you have a Greek Coordinator listed on your campaign team. Yet Greek Life seems to be such a small part of your platform. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Tom: Currently we have two people that work on Greek Life. One is my brother Michael Madsen, who works with Fraternity Life, and the other is EmilyAnn Brueck, who works with Sorority Life. And although our platform may not seem big, there is a lot of stuff that throughout our platform contributes to Greek Life. One big thing we're looking into are the presidential roundtables. I know a big part of what I've talked to members of Greek Life about is this huge stigma about Greek Life and how NISG and most of the campus treats them as something separate from the university. We don't want that. We want to bring them in, because they're a very important part of UNI. We'd bring in the heads of all these different sororities and fraternities and talk to them and ask what we can do for them, what they can do for the university and how we can collaborate and get their name out there. I feel like that'd be huge. We'd meet either once or twice a semester depending on, for instance, the needs of the fraternities or if issues came up. So right now we're extending out that hand to fraternities and sororities and telling them that we want to help. They do a lot of good on campus, more than with just their philanthropies, and they're a really important part of campus.

Q: Your platform talks about holding presidential roundtables, presenting to student organizations and posting weekly vlogs/blogs. How do you intend to accomplish all of this without spreading yourself and your office too thin?

Tom: I'd like to talk to every single student organization out there, but we realize that is going to be an extremely difficult task and we're going to try to get to as many different groups as we can. But I'm not going to make the unrealistic goal that we're going to see every single group. I don't want to give false hope to people when it is not realistic. And when it comes to the roundtables and stuff like that, we feel like it's something that's really important and too often, in NISG, we go to our meetings and then we talk to a couple of our constituents and that's about it. But with these roundtables, it's important and, although it might add a little bit more stress onto it, I feel like the importance of it will make it worh it. And both Blake and I are very dedicated and we know how to spread ourselves out and we time management quite well, so we are looking forward to these roundtables. We also want to extend some of this work to our senators and some of their committees, so we're not putting all the pressure on the executive branch.

And that is a wrap on the questions for Tom. Be sure to check back later for Part 2 and find out what Blake had to say in our interview!