The College of Natural Science and Mathematics was the least represented college on campus through the Student Government Association in the last term, but all four legislative seats have been filled this year.
Biology and chemistry major John Flynt is returning for another year as an SGA senator. Last year, Flynt was one of two SGA senators representing NSM. This year, Flynt will get some much needed assistance.
“There was only one seat of four being occupied (last year), so I ran for SGA to fill one of the seats,” he said. “This year, I made sure all four seats were filled.”
Flynt said that he sees things that need to be done within NSM and is looking forward to getting started.
“I decided to run again because there are problems within my college that the current senators were not addressing,” Flynt said. “Within the college, we have a bad retention rate. We are only retaining about 70 percent of our freshmen and sophomores. The percentage of those that actually graduate from the college is about 32 percent.”
However, Flynt said that is the number of high school students that come directly from high school to UH. That does not include transfer students or those who take a year off.
Flynt said that he plans to combat this low retention rate by implementing new programs for students this year.
“I had a meeting with the dean about this,” Flynt said. “We are going to form a student action initiative program where the NSM senators are going to go out and get enthusiastic students to come and help us campaign to high school students, so that we can get the graduation rate up.”
Other senators have different ideas about what needs to be done in NSM. Sahr Ahmed, who was elected to NSM seat No. 1, said that she ran for SGA because there are a lot of things that can be done to improve the students’ way of life in NSM.
“There are a lot of things we can do in the college,” Ahmed said. “A lot of students are not happy about the computer labs in NSM, so we’re trying to see what we can do about that.”
Ahmed is a member of SGA for the first time and said the best thing about being an SGA senator is the ability to help the student body.
“I love helping the students. I love that I can be their voice,” she said. “Basically we are a bridge between the student body and the administration, so we try to help out.”
Anna Zulfiquar, who was elected to seat No. 3, said that there needs to be something done about the computer labs in the college of NSM.
“We don’t really have a computer lab,” said Zulfiquar.
Zulfiquar said that she was very surprised that many students were not very well informed about SGA. This is something that she would like to fix in the upcoming year.
“During the campaign process, I would go up to students and tell them that SGA elections were upcoming,” she said. “For the most part, they did not even know what SGA was.”
While some senators are focusing on things that will primarily help the student body, others are concentrating on the university as a whole.
Brandon Balwant, who was elected to seat No. 4, said that he wants to make improvements on campus not limited to NSM.
“I ran for SGA primarily because I saw many problems going on across the university,” Balwant said. “I personally thought that I could fix those problems.”
Balwant said that one of the big problems that he had and that a lot of people complained about was the Internet connection across campus.
“It has really sloppy signal wherever you go,” he said.
Balwant recently visited the UH Health Center, and certain issues caught his attention.
“I talked to some of the doctors and nurses there, and they told me that they were understaffed, among other problems,” Balwant said. “Personally, I think we could build a new clinic on campus. I think that would be very beneficial not only to the staff of the clinic, but it would be really beneficial for the students.”
