2019 GSA candidate endorsement: Paul Nesterenko for vice president of internal affairs
(Amy Dixon/Photo editor)
By Editorial Board
April 8, 2019 10:42 p.m.
Everyone can have ideas – but it’s a matter of implementing them.
Paul Nesterenko is the only candidate running for the Graduate Students Association vice president of internal affairs seat. And needless to say, he has a lot he wants to accomplish.
He is running on the Moving Forward slate first organized by current president Michael Skiles. As a collective group, candidates in this slate are advocating for affordable housing and improved socials to better integrate graduate students into campus life.
Nesterenko’s plans for organizing these events are promising. He wants to increase the frequency of socials and diversify how they are held for students not necessarily interested in the typical graduate student bar scene. He also wants to speak with administrators in order to prevent further increases and negotiate lowering costs for graduate student housing.
His plans also include increasing student stipends – which he argues are hardly enough to live on given the current cost of housing. And he wants to make graduate noncritical program fees, which show up as a blanket cost on students’ BruinBills, transparent. This kind of forthrightness is an essential ingredient to dismantling the many price tags tacked onto graduate students during their time at UCLA.
But Nesterenko has no clear plan for getting UCLA to show the books. Not only does this make his ideas about transparency vague, but it also makes it doubtful he’ll be able to achieve them at all. And this is a pitfall for people who take the position of vice president of internal affairs – focusing on talking to other people but never actually getting to acting on those identified issues.
Moreover, transparency is only the first step toward reducing the many fees graduate students pay. Not having a plan for how to get the university to find funds from other places is a nonstarter for getting administrators to come to the negotiating table.
Certainly, the approach to on-campus advocacy is to hear from others. This will be especially critical for Nesterenko, who doesn’t have much experience in GSA, having only been involved in it for a year. But even though he’ll need to learn from others, he’ll also need to work on making his many ideas a reality.
This board endorses Nesterenko for his promising goals, but he’ll need to ensure throughout his term he doesn’t become stagnant. Transparency for noncritical program fees, for example, is a worthy issue to look into – but it’s only a starting point.
After all, being a leader isn’t about making goals. It’s about achieving them.
