Duke Student Government voted to approve a new program that allows student teams to implement campus improvement projects with DSG funding at its meeting Wednesday.
“Pitch-a-Project” will allow students to propose ideas they believe would improve the undergraduate experience at Duke, said Michael Norwalk, vice president for facilities and the environment, who presented the proposal for the program in open senate. The new program’s budget, which will only provide funding for this year under current legislation, allocates $50,000 from DSG’s current surplus of $151,331.73. Student proposals can receive up to $7,500 in funding each under the program, but the money allocated may not all be spent.
Norwalk compared the idea to Fix My Campus, a DSG affiliate body, since both aim to implement projects that would make improvements to campus life. Fix My Campus works with the administration to implement changes, whereas the new program would fund student proposals directly.
“We’re crowd-sourcing to get new innovative ideas from the student body and to increase our engagement beyond just the DSG Senate room and engage the whole student body more than we have in the past,” Norwalk said. “I think it should be a really cool opportunity for students to get together with their friends… and have an idea for something they think could be a beneficial thing to add to campus that we’ve overlooked.”
DSG also discussed and voted on questions for the DSG Research Unit to investigate throughout the next year regarding life for students on campus. Possible questions included ones concerning sexual health, voting in elections, advising, social life and campus safety. The final three questions will be announced at next week’s meeting.
Senior Operations Advisor Abhi Sanka, who leads the DSGRU, said in Senate that the goal of the senators should be to come up with the questions most relevant to the student body, and the goal of DSGRU is to figure out the best methods of answering those questions.
“The research unit functions as an independent team of investigators who are very quantitatively oriented and have really hard skills in data science," Sanka said. "They’re going to take these questions that were commissioned today and for the remainder of semester develop methodologies and gather evidence surrounding some of the questions that, as student government representatives, we would like evidence behind as we think about how to approach some of these problems that we think exist on campus."
This is DSGRU’s second year in operation. Last year, Sanka created the research unit as then-Executive Vice President after realizing the ability of research to better identify and address the needs of the student body.
"As data science becomes more popular, it’s something that’s catching on.”
In other business:
Executive Vice President John Guarco, a junior, and Senator for Academic Affairs Kushal Kadakia, a freshman, argued in favor of moving DSG to a plurality system for voting to increase voter turnout by making voting easier. The proposal was introduced last meeting. Bryan Dinner, vice president for social culture, argued against the shift, saying DSG’s focus should not be on improving their own voter turnout numbers. Debate was tabled until next week’s meeting.
The Student Organization Funding Committee presented two new groups—the National Organization of Business and Engineering and the Duke Pre-Physical Therapy Association. DSG voted to approve $6,054 in funding for the Duke International Association’s fall festival, which is approximately $1000 less than what they had requested.
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