The Student News Site of Northern Michigan University

The North Wind

The North Wind

The North Wind

Meet the Staff
Dallas Wiertella
Dallas Wiertella
Multimedia Editor

Through my experience here at the North Wind I have been able to have the privilege of highlighting students through all forms of multimedia journalism. Whether I'm in front or behind the camera, I aim...

The North Wind Editorial Sessions
About us

The North Wind is an independent student publication serving the Northern Michigan University community. It is partially funded by the Student Activity Fee. The North Wind digital paper is published daily during the fall and winter semesters except on university holidays and during exam weeks. The North Wind Board of Directors is composed of representatives of the student body, faculty, administration and area media.

RECORDS ON RECORDS — Teichman shows a variety of records on display at the Vinyl Emporium. With 10,000 records being brought in from downstate, there is something for everyone at the record show. Photo courtesy of Jon Teichman
Local record show promotes community connectivity
Megan VoorheesMarch 28, 2024

Meet 2017’s ASNMU candidates

Meet 2017’s ASNMU candidates

The North Wind sat down with each candidate and asked the same four questions to each person. The answers are edited for clarity and length.

Running for re-election as president: Tristan Ruiz- Biochemistry major- Sophomore

re-Tristan_P

Q: Why are you running?
A: I’m looking to bring a little more continuity to the organization after several years in the past of different leaderships to ensure the programs and products we have going on now are going to work efficiently and be seen through. Using what I’ve learned from this year I want to figure out how do we improve student input to ASNMU and ASNMU giving
information back to the students.

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Q: If elected, what is your platform? What are you hoping to accomplish?
A: One thing is the Green Fund, which is going to be like the student
activity fee where every student pays $1 per semester to support sustainability issues on campus. It will be a specific, continuous funding source for sustainability.

Q: What do you see as the biggest issue facing NMU students today? How to plan to fix it?
A: Some issues I’ve heard of are outside of our control as an organization, but one that is within our control is making sure Indigenous People’s Day is passed through the Board of Trustees. We are worried that might not get passed through. The second one is making sure that we support transparent decision making on our campus. Not just from administration but also from the faculty. The Wildcat Shuttle, that also is a very big issue. That’s also very important to try and sustain that as much as we can.

Q: In your experience, what do you perceive as the overall goal of ASNMU?
A: The goal is to make students aware of what is happening on campus and then represent what the students want to faculty and administration. That,
in my mind, is the ultimate purpose of ASNMU, even if we had no programming, or services, at the very least, the student government should be the people students feel they can go to. It is being able to channel the student voice into a more official and concise way for people to really feel the force of the student body.

Running for re-election as vice president: Connor Loftus- Fisheries and Wildlife Management major- Junior

re-Connor_VPQ: Why are you running?
A: Because we have a great team right now and we want to carry that over so we can have some consistency in the student government. The student government hasn’t always had the greatest history on campus and we’ve done a really good job of changing that narrative this semester so we want to carry that over into the next semester and continue legitimizing and shoring up our position on campus.

Q: If elected, what is your platform? What are you hoping to accomplish?
A: We want to make sure that the students are investing in the decision making. We have seats on every university committee so we need to make sure we’re filling those seats and having the students be a part of every conversation going on. We need to make sure that the student representatives are getting out and talking to the people that they’re representing.  One issue that I’m personally going to focus a lot of energy on is the continued push for transparency.

Q: What do you see as the biggest issue facing NMU students today? How to plan to fix it?
A: The university trying to make decisions to better [NMU] without even considering their current student base. They’re looking to the future, they’re rebranding the university, but they’re rebranding on ideas that aren’t necessarily in line with what’s on campus, what the students are thinking. Sharing that voice at the level that we can with administration also, communicating what we’re hearing from the administration back to [students] in a timely and visible manner so also being transparent ourselves. We just don’t need to be the speaker for the students, we also need to share information with them.

Q: In your experience, what do you perceive as the overall goal of ASNMU?
A:  Communication is key when we’re trying to push transparency and trying to ensure that students are being heard. Our main theme is just engagement in the university at all levels really.

 

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