Martin Gutierrez is running for GPSA president. The Daily Lobo talked with him about his campaign focuses, including making GPSA more transparent and reducing graduate student expenses.
Daily Lobo: Why are you running for president of GPSA?
Martin Gutierrez: There is a crisis in leadership right now in GPSA. Law students in support of secession demonstrates that there is a lack of communication and community involvement by the current administration … Each semester that passes — first with the Locksley incident and the Athletic funding and now with the law school and the SFRB process. So, my schedule has now afforded me the time to do this.
DL: What is your stance on the special election that happened last semester about Athletics?
MG: We need to focus on solutions to fill that gap, because we need to make sure that graduate education is affordable. President Obama challenged us to go back to school. Graduate school is the next undergraduate degree. We need to make a commitment to make sure that graduate school is affordable and that we’re working on solutions to close that gap. We shouldn’t be upset about things that aren’t leading us to make sure that goal is achieved.
DL: What do you think the job of the president entails?
MG: What I want to make it is the epicenter for graduate success. GPSA needs to have information regarding research, funding and grants and archive it so people know where to look for that in the future. It needs to be transparent. I’m going to post all of my documents and everything that is related to official GPSA business online. I want to be the president who brings the law school in and addresses those concerns and comes up with a long-term solution so there’s no talk of this anymore.
DL: What are a few things that you would like to see change within GPSA?
MG: Well the first thing I’d like to see changed is, as GPSA president, I’ll show up to meetings for our independent groups and organizations; I’ll show up to faculty meetings that require us to show up to. I’ll attend meetings with the regents and the president. I’ve heard from a lot of people within the graduate student population that the current president hasn’t attended a lot of meetings. I’ll be available between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., the University hours. But I don’t want to be in the office; I want to be out meeting with people … The next thing I would like to do is have the graduate students speak through me and not speak for the graduate students, which means I would like for the students to communicate with us so when we do come upon a crisis, like we saw with the Athletics Department and even the SFRB, the president is speaking on behalf of the students. They’re not just a small group of people who meet on Saturday at 12 and decide on a position.
DL: What are some of the most important issues to grad students?
MG: The cost of grad school. The cost of grad school is different than undergrad because we don’t have the Lottery Scholarship. Most of us are living on our own, so we have to pay for our living expenses, our food (and) transportation expenses. We have to pay for our books. Graduate school has become expensive, so, I think for grad students, the most pressing issue is how do we make up this gap in funding because of this recession. For me, I think we need to look for alternative sources of funding, to become more independent and be responsible for our funding.
