Campus, News

BUtiful Dreamers focus on reliability, transparency

Members of the BUtiful Dreamers Student Government slate Joshua Lee (SMG '16), Nicole Simons (CAS '16), Barron Roth (ENG '17) and Noah McAskill (SMG '16) speak at a slate debate in the George Sherman Union Thursday. PHOTO BY ALEX MASSET/DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF
Members of the BUtiful Dreamers Student Government slate Joshua Lee (SMG ’16), Nicole Simons (CAS ’16), Barron Roth (ENG ’16) and Noah McAskill (SMG ’16) speak at a slate debate in the George Sherman Union Thursday. PHOTO BY ALEX MASSET/DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF

BUtiful Dreamers, the third slate running for Boston University Student Government, hopes to increase the cohesiveness of the student body though simple, but connective initiatives based on reliability and transparency.

The BUtiful Dreamers slate is made up of Nicole Simons for president, Barron Roth for executive vice president, Joshua Lee for vice president of finance and Noah McAskill for vice president of internal affairs.

None of the members of the slate have any previous experience or involvement with SG and said they have felt a bit like the underdog in this race.

“We’re not the type of people who seem like we’d try for something like student government,” said McAskill, a junior in the School of Management.

Lee said the slate has embraced the challenges of running for SG executive board positions.

“We love a challenge, and we’re always trying to take ourselves to the next level, so we have a great group of friends here, and we wanted to take the next step for us and for the school,” said Lee, a junior in SMG. “We thought we could have fun with it, but we wanted to push ourselves and learn from it.”

The BUtiful Dreamers slate has developed four initiatives it believes will bring BU students together. One initiative is a rooftop garden initiative, partnering with the BU Organic Gardening Club to plant gardens on top of BU’s buildings. They also want to enact “Brother and Sisters per Major,” a committee that meets once a month to set up meetings between upperclassmen mentors and underclassmen.

Another initiative proposed by the BUtiful Dreamers slate involves donating leftover dining points and meal swipes at the end of each semester to charity.

“Its crazy to us no one has thought out it yet,” said Simons, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. “It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s beneficial to society.”

The slate’s final initiative has been dubbed “Social Cups,” and involves adding red, reusable cups to each BU dining hall. Students would put the red cup on their table to signal that they are alone and willing to be approached. Simons said this would be most effective among freshman trying to meet people and establish relationships.

“It could even be a hashtag, there could be funny pictures with the #desperate or with a caption, ‘How many red cups do I need to get someone to sit with me?’ and it’d be a fun social thing,” Simons said.

On its website, the slate has set up Terrier Voice, a service that allows students to anonymously submit ideas or opinions or problems to a public bulletin board where BUtiful Dreamers slate members can then address such issues directly in a transparent setting, without any red tape, said Roth, a junior in the College of Engineering.

“The thing we want to stress with our ideas is that with us, people will actually know that they are going on,” Simons said.

Simons, whose main leadership experience comes from being the representative of her dorm floor in the Residence Hall Association and working in the CAS Writing Center, stressed the unfortunate existence of a gap between students at BU, from the lack of school spirit to the lack of communication between students and the government overseeing them.

“We want to bring Student Government to the forefront of the student body because the Student Government is supposed to represent the student body, but we feel like right now and what we need to change is that student government is fending for itself and the student body is fending for itself, but there’s no connection,” Simons said.

The entire slate agreed that student government should be fixing this issue, but hasn’t had the right people for the job.

“The other slates that are running are the typical people you’d expect to run,” Simons said. “There is a certain stereotype that runs for student government, and we do not fit into that stereotype whatsoever.”

If the problems with student government are rooted in its inability to connect with the student body, McAskill said, their slate has a much better shot at mending such a gap because they are a group of leaders who already have a strongly established repertoire with the student body, which can be easily transported into their governance.

“We’re good at interacting with people and all have a pretty wide reach with people across campus as it is, that it would be much more efficient for us to go in and enter this new Student Government bubble and be able to break that barrier than the current people in Student Government,” said McAskill, who is also a co-founder of BU Bitcoin Club.

Simons said they want the student body to at least vote, hoping the slate’s unique, “kind of questionable” name will attract students, in contrast to the other two slates.

“I mean if it were me,” she said. “I think I’d vote for some beautiful dreamers.”

More Articles

One Comment

  1. Has anyone asked Roth about the app he created about connecting with friends? Their whole platform for their campaign sounds like one big lead in to selling their app. No one questioned him about that??