The Asian Student Union held elections for the 2015-16 executive board recently. The presidents and vice presidents of ASU member organizations were eligible to vote in the election.
Second-year Commerce student Kevin Cao was elected president, third-year College student Jannatul Pramanik was elected vice president of organizations, third-year College student Jinny Chen was elected vice president of administration, third-year Commerce student Michelle Zeng was elected treasurer and first-year Engineering student Yuesen He was elected secretary.
Outgoing treasurer and third-year College student Whitney Wu, who also ran for president, said the executive board elections this year were competitive. Outgoing president and fourth-year College student Nikoe Navarro echoed Wu’s insights.
“The position of the president, the vice president of organizations and the vice president of administration were all highly contested,” Navarro said. We had to do interim applications for the treasurer and secretary positions.”
Source: Kevin Cao
Navarro said he feels the biggest challenge the incoming board will face is lack of experience. None of the newly elected members have previously held an executive position on ASU.
Despite these challenges, Navarro said he remains optimistic about the board’s future.
“There will be a lot of hurdles on the way, but I am confident enough to say that they have what it takes to succeed,” Navarro said.
Wu said she hopes the incoming executive board will continue the legacy of ASU while allowing it to grow and change with all the recent dialogues on grounds.
Part of their annual work includes the ASU Date Auction, which remains one of their biggest events. This year the club was able to raise $3,481 for the City of Promise, an organization that aims to improve the education and development of local children.
ASU’s Valentine’s Day goodie-bags for the University’s children’s hospital are part of this legacy as well and one of Wu’s favorite projects.
“It may not sound like much, but it's a tradition my service co-chairs and I started last year to bring some fun to the children at U.Va's Children's Hospital,” Wu said. “This was our second year doing the event, and this year the hospital wrote us a letter thanking us and telling us they looked forward to the goodie bags next year.”
For the past three years, ASU has held an annual Benefit Concert during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This year’s concert will host headliner Jeni Suk, who will perform at Thursday evening in McLeod Hall — marking the official transition to the new executive board.
Chen said this time of year is a moment for the outgoing and incoming boards to collaborate.
“[The concert] was in conjunction [with the previous executive board] so it’s kind of a transition period. The old [board] plans half and the new [board] plans the closing ceremony,” Chen said.
Looking towards the future, multiple members of the incoming Executive Board noted their two main goals are to combat apathy within the organization and collaborate with more minority groups in the greater University community.
Cao emphasized the organization’s commitment to working other minority groups on grounds as the year progresses.
“I’m really excited to continue our partnership and our relationship with other minority organizations on Grounds — Black Student Alliance, Latino Student Alliance and the Queer Student Union among others,” Cao said.
The council also hopes to combat a lack of enthusiasm by shrinking the number of councils in order to better focus on the tasks at hand and to give each member of the councils greater responsibility within the group.
“Apathy is a really big problem within our committees and so Jinny has restructured council to basically downsize it and then have each council focus on just the main tenets of what ASU wants to do,” Michelle Chen said. “It’s been reduced down from eight to five to just work out this apathy problem that we’ve had in the past.”
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