The Graduate Student Council (GSC) elected Emily Schell and Jason Anderson as co-chairs and swore in all 15 voting members of the 2022-2023 council during its Wednesday meeting.
The swearing in ceremony was facilitated by new Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) vice president Christian Sanchez ’22, who was elected to the executive body in the 2022 ASSU general election. During the ceremony, each member of the new council was asked to take an oath of office.
During its meeting last week, the outgoing council certified the results of the election of the new council after filling the remaining two GSC positions representing the Graduate School of Business and Graduate School of Education. The two positions required additional deliberations after the election because of a tie between multiple write-in candidates. Wednesday’s meeting is the last of the quarter for the current council, which will be replaced by the new council starting next week.
Schell, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in developmental and psychological sciences, and Anderson, a third-year Ph.D. student in aeronautics and astronautics, were unanimously elected co-chairs of the new council. The confirmation vote is the first taken by the new council.
Incumbent councilor and fifth-year Ph.D. student in modern thought and literature Jamie Fine endorsed the new co-chairs ahead of the vote, praising Schell and Anderson for their involvement with the council throughout the school year.
“They are different personalities who will work well together,” Fine said. “As a leadership team, I think that they’re going to be very helpful in bringing to the table more graduate voices.”
In one of the final votes of the school year for the outgoing council, the GSC confirmed Jas Espinosa ’18 M.A. ’19 as the Financial Manager and CEO of Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE). Espinosa has previously served as a business operations manager for SSE and an undergraduate senator for the ASSU.
“I’m very humbled and honored to be running for this position,” Espinosa said. “SSE has always been a landing page for me in my professional trajectory.”
Mail and package issues were back on the table as councilors heard from Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) representatives during their biweekly meeting with the council. The GSC has been engaged in discussion with R&DE representatives throughout the year over numerous mail and package issues, including mail being returned to sender.
According to Executive Director of R&DE Student Housing Operations Imogen Hinds, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has continued to request examples of mail being returned to sender as it investigates student complaints about this issue. Although returned mail remains a perplexing problem for R&DE, it has been able to figure out what is happening with most student mailing complaints, Hinds said.
She added that UG2, which serves as Stanford’s mail service provider, is cooperating with R&DE to provide the information necessary to further examine the mailing issues. Hinds stressed R&DE’s commitment to resolving these issues as quickly as possible.
“This is definitely something that is frustrating, and as the current council knows, we’ve been working on this for quite some time,” Hinds said. “We really don’t want this to have to continue. It doesn’t help anybody.”