Incumbent senator-at-large Romina Hajizadeh is running for her second term on a platform of increasing engagement with students and prioritizing equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI).
The third-year arts student hopes to leverage her previous experience serving on the Senate to achieve these goals, noting that one of the biggest challenges she faced last year was a steep learning curve in adjusting to the Senate’s operations.
“Once you learn how to navigate [the] Senate, you're a lot more effective and the longer you are on a body like this, the more effective you can be,” Hajizadeh said.
Hajizadeh is the current co-chair of the Student Senate Caucus, and vice-chair of the Agenda Committee, roles she would seek re-appointment to.
If elected, Hajizadeh hopes to collaborate with student groups on campus to increase Senate visibility, noting that, unlike other student governance groups such as the AMS, the Senate doesn’t “really have a space on campus where we are meeting students face-to-face every day.”
Hajizadeh said that she would need to do further research on what groups might be interested in collaborating with the student senators.
Another priority for Hajizadeh is continuing work to implement EDI best practices.
“It’s really important that we make those efforts to decolonize our perspectives and remove our own unconscious biases going into things. So that's a big priority for me in terms of whatever committees I end up getting placed on.”
Hajizadeh ran on the campaign promise of creating an EDI committee last year and expressed that “the standing EDI committee is still something we want to do,” but said there was less interest in starting new committees before the Senate entered a new three-year cycle, or triennium this year.
With a new triennium starting next year, however, “there’s going to be new student senators, but also new faculty… everything is shifting up and changing,” Hajizadeh said. “There is more of an opportunity to have new committees.”
Looking back at successes during her first year in office, Hajizadeh pointed to the sending back of a proposed motion that would have changed the Allard School of Law’s admission process, which currently allows students to drop their four lowest grades when submitting their transcripts.
“They wanted to… change it to a GPA addendum explaining why your GPA is the way it is,” Hajizadeh said. “And so this [would have] majorly disadvantaged a lot of students [and] put the burden on students to explain their circumstances.”
“We actually got that to be taken back to committee and it was never brought back. So that was a really big win for students.”
Hajizadeh said having institutional knowledge while on the Senate is important, especially as student senators are elected for single year terms in a body that operates on a triennium cycle, which can be difficult to navigate as a newcomer.
“Our caucus right now is trying to mitigate that by having Canvas modules for new senators coming in,” Hajizadeh said. “New senators who are elected can do the modules and learn about each committee… so that they feel more comfortable going into the spaces.”
Hajizadeh is running against fellow incumbent Kamil Kanji and newcomers Kareem Hassib, Mathew Ho, Ayesha Irfan, Davey Li and Sultana Razia.
Follow us at @UbysseyNews on Twitter and follow our election coverage starting February 27. This article is part of our 2023 AMS Elections coverage.
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