"Keeping it simple and fun" - Green Team
As the Student Government Elections’ campaign period approaches its final week with the voting period starting on March 19th, the Green Team, also known as “the Green Army” sit down with the Stork to get an in-depth insight into what the team offers.
Led by Karl Pairault, a French-Romanian 2nd year BBA student, the team solidly placed third during last week’s poll, collecting 183 votes (22.6%), establishing a strong claim for the Student Government seat. Aiming for a more practical approach to solving the students’ issues, the Green Team views that promising ideas that could be difficult to accomplish is relatively misleading. Instead, they are determined that a simplified method to fixing the problems might hold the key to achieving success.
Running under the motto “Your Experience, Our Experience”, the Green Team offers proposals to increase student empowerment and educational opportunities and to solve current issues, such as the student divide between Madrid and Segovia campuses. One of their central goals is to emphasize both internal and external communication to ensure a more efficient and effective coordination.
“We want our communication with class representatives, clubs, events and activities to be both efficient and effective,” says Pairault, “We were shocked to see how people interact with our social media page. We had nearly 200 answers in our polls with students offering so many proposals and ideas.”
The team believes that to engage students more effectively, there needs to be a modernized approach to transmit information. Tools, such as WhatsApp, could provide a crucial and a centralized way to ensure more effective communication.
“Communication is something that every institution struggles with. For example, companies on Forbes struggle with internal communication, because it’s something difficult to get right,” says Marlene Lantz, the Italian-American 2nd year BIS student, running as Communications Officer, “We want to be able to change and facilitate the organization of the university to flow better and make communication more productive.”
One of the proposals is to unify Campus Groups and Campus Online platforms to reduce student unawareness and ensure a more integrated approach for digital engagement. The team believes that their unification would ease students’ ability to observe and participate in events.
The main plan to achieve this proposal, which could be easily rejected by the administration due to Student Government mandate’s limits, is to directly engage with the IT Department and pitch two options. Either create a new platform, integrated with all aspects of current Campus Online and Campus Groups, or offer an alternative to the platform that could solve the issue.
Emphasizing feasibility and practicality, the Green Team aims to negotiate a restructuring of the attendance policy, which has been one of the focal points between the majority of teams. The team, however, proposes to link participation and attendance and create a consolidated percentage that could reflect a more qualitative involvement of individuals during a class.
“The university has made it clear that you cannot change the attendance policy. But what we can do is change the link between attendance and participation to have a fairer way to evaluate participation,” state Green Team leaders, “For example, I [Marlene] wasn’t excused when I was on a sick leave. There should be a way to find fair exemptions for people that have to skip class due to serious circumstances.”
Another pertinent issue that the team aims to revise is to emphasize to the university administration the importance of professors’ level of English. However, the professor’s English ability is rooted more within the internal structure of the university, the team looks to voice collective concerns of the students and push for improvement within the Student Government’s mandate.
“We have heard numerous complaints from students about the level of English and the teaching method of professors at IE,” says Pairault, “We want to voice the concerns of the students and find innovative ways to solve the problem.”
The repetitive issue of the integration between Madrid and Segovia campuses has been plaguing the entire campaign. With some teams offering concrete proposals, such as to establish “a shuttle bus”, the Green Team looks yet again for feasibility and practicality. The team explains that creating hype for events could provide a crucial role to increase student engagement. Moreover, they state that the Student Government must place importance on the value of pride and student belonging to the university.
“We believe there’s nothing more satisfying for a community to be proud of each other. We have the chance to have different passions/goals/talents and each person in the community brings its own value,” explains Pairault, “We need to continue to make the community proud through different activities and we believe it’s achievable with the right planning, transportation, promotion and smart fund allocation.”
The team believes that the previously mentioned hype, especially for sports events and networking activities could be useful to building the community spirit.
“One of the most powerful tools to building the community is sport and networking for a cause,” says Pairault, “By promoting events that bring the students to a common cause could boost the community spirit.”
Another crucial aspect of the “Green Army” is to ensure that extracurricular clubs remain active throughout the entire academic year. One of the biggest problems for clubs is the omittance of the club’s leaders to sustain time and effort to engage its members after the first weeks of the semester. Hence, the team offers to create constant monitoring system that could push clubs to be more active.
“It’s important to establish a way where we make sure that the club remains active,” says Lantz, “A way to measure the club’s activity would be weekly reports that could signal to us that the club is active, and its members are happy.”
Hence, the team believes that a more rigorous approach to club’s activity would be through feedbacks, which would oblige non-active leaders to rejuvenate the club or simply surrender their positions to more active members. If the clubs would fail to comply, then the Student Government should be able to cut the funding and allocate the money elsewhere.
Team
The team was formed with Lantz announcing on Facebook that she wants to run for Student Government. Aside from sporadically meeting Lantz at a rugby game and a party, this attracted Pairault to band forces together and create the Green Team. Both began to select the best profiles that would suit their ideas. As a result, one of the youngest teams (all members beside Cloe Attieh, who is a 1st year, are 2nd years), characterized by 7 nationalities, 5 degrees was formed.
The Green Team states that despite the fact that members had barely known each other before, they will be able to stick together and ensure cohesiveness during their term. As they describe, the team held preliminary selection for the best profiles and assessed each candidate position on qualities such as motivation, diversity, rebelliousness and other aspects. Frustrated by being able to only listen to others’ complaints, the members collectively recognized the need to help fellow students.
Despite the elective uncertainty, the Team aims to continue contributing ideas to the winner. When asked to describe the ideal “Green Team” voter, they emphasized optimism, engagement, passion, and a drive to make a difference in the university. Finally, the team also said that regardless of the elections’ results, they will stick together afterwards, as the elections’ campaign bonded.
Green Team, IG: greenteam_iesg
Karl Pairault – President, Madrid, IG: svnkarl
Marlene Lantz – Communications Officer BIS 2nd year, Italian American, Madrid, IG: marlenejl97
Cloe Attieh – Segovia Academics Officer – PLE, 1st year, Lebanese, Segovia, IG: cloeattieh
Carmen Oballe – Madrid Academics Officer – BIS 2nd year, Spanish, Madrid, IG: carmenoballe_
Laura Simon – Segovia Community Officer, - BBA/LLB, 2nd year, Spanish-Belgian, Segovia, laurasicle
Sam Blanchard – Madrid Community Officer – French-Guatemalan, BCDM 2nd year, Madrid, samuelblchrd
The Stork will be posting more information about the final week of the elections. Stay tuned to our social media or visit iestork.org to find out more about other teams and their proposals