Solomon Yi-Kieran is running to earn a seat as a student senator-at-large on a platform of academic and accessibility support.
His campaign is set on pushing “concrete and very reasonably doable policies” that have immediate benefits for students.
During his first year at UBC, the arts student has served as a first year representative on UBC Arts Undergraduate Society and the chair of its first-year committee, however he felt that the roles lacked “actual advocacy.”
“I had a lot of advocacy in my platform that I really wanted to run on and I really wanted to see. I was talking to people and basically they said [Senate] would be a good place to bring my advocacy goals,” said Yi-Kieran.
He hopes to use his experience in provincial politics as a member of the BC NDP party to advocate for policies in the Senate.
“My kind of resume with student politics within the AUS and high school and everything [is] a testament to me having a careful eye and [ability] to plan,” Yi-Kieran said.
His platform dubbed, “Advocating for You,” is an effort to help give students in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community more attention to their concerns. Yi-Kieran plans to push for a system which allows all students to report their pronouns to the teaching team without being misgendered or outed to their peers.
“I'd have friends who had been repeatedly misgendered by professors who just aren't taking the time to care to learn about their pronouns, and that makes [the classroom] a less comfortable space,” he said.
On academic support, Yi-Kieran’s main goal is to install a database of previous exams for each course to help students succeed in culminating evaluations.
By putting this database in place, he believes less students will be misled by online answer services such as Chegg and use “actual, useful resources … in a way that doesn’t end up committing academic dishonesty.”
He also sees issues in current policies with exam accommodations in regards to examination hardship, cancellation and clashes. Current exam hardship policies allow students to reschedule an exam when there are three or more formal evaluations during a 24-hour period.
Yi-Kieran wants to revise this by reducing the requirement to two exams within a 12 hour period, citing a need for the institution to be “a lot more reasonable for students who have to juggle a lot.”
When asked about potential doubts of his knowledge of the Senate as a first-year student, Yi-Kieran responded candidly that he comes into this race with “a fresh set of eyes.”
As a first-year student, he feels an even greater need to fight for issues that he is “going to have to deal with everyday for the next four years” if he doesn’t take a stand now.
Yi-Kieran is running against current student senators Kareem Hassib and Kamil Kanji, as well as first-time candidates Alex Chui, Kyle Rogers, Sahib Malik, Ferdinand Rother, Taushifa Shaikh and Jasper Lorien.
This article is part of our 2024 AMS Elections coverage. Follow us at @UbysseyNews on X (formerly Twitter) and follow our election coverage starting February 27.
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