USC

USG Election Results

Last night, USG elections results came to a close for the president and vice president. The new cabinet has plans to streamline many aspects of USC.

[One-sentence description of what this media is: "A photo of a vaccine site on USC campus" or "Gif of dancing banana". Important for accessibility/people who use screen readers.]

USG leaders urged students to vote for the 2023-24 presidential and senatorial races. (Photo by Aditya Thiyag)

By Skye Lee, Spencer Cline and Devon Lee

Divya Jakatdar and Michelle Lu won the USC undergraduate student government presidential election.

This year’s election was particularly competitive as there was a record 5 presidential candidates with their vice president counterparts that ran in the presidential race.The election results revealed that Jakatdar and Lu won with 38% of the vote.

While their role does not officially begin yet, Jaktadar and Lu are already taking small steps to help improve USC. We spoke with these ladies regarding their plans for the upcoming months.

Jaktadar: So in the short term, we’re going to see how we can start to implement like structural changes within the organization, because those those are internal. But then once we actually begin the role starting in around April, the actual date hasn’t been set yet. That’s when we get to push out those those short term projects like the housing directorate or the medical supply vending machines, which not necessarily a short term project, but something that can be released around them.

Michelle Lu further explains the timeline of their project and how it has been in the works for a few years now.

Lu: A lot of the projects that we had put on our platform we were working on for a couple of years now are currently working on. Medical supply vending machines, for example. We are expecting to roll that out in the next 2 to 3 months. The housing directory. We want to roll that out as soon as possible.

As Jaktdar explains, taking the steps now to improve the structure will provide a strong foundation to make bigger changes.

Jaktdar: It’s part of the structural changes that we’re looking at right now are also those kinds of culture things within our organization in terms of seeing how we can also implement those behavioral issues, strikes, things like that, so that we have a good environment to begin with to get those projects done ultimately.

Overall, these ladies are hopeful that students will be happy the changes that they plan on implementing.

Jaktdar: Yeah, I think I think these are things that because we’re here for students lives, the things that we want to do and the reason that we created this platform is because a lot of these projects will make students lives easier. But some of these projects could actually change the quality of life for four or different students on campus. And that’s why we believe it’s so important and we’re really grateful for that. Students seem to agree.

For Annenberg media, I’m Skye Lee