Safet Mesanovic and Gener Romeu Oliva are international students who say they want to give the Syracuse University Student Association a new voice: the student voice.

Running as write-in candidates for SA president and vice president, respectively, Mesanovic and Oliva said SA is an organization that’s supposed to represent all SU students, but this isn’t currently the case. The pair said they believe this is due to SA currently lacking representatives from a variety of majors and functioning as too much of a “closed” organization.

Mesanovic said he and Oliva have talked with hundreds of students, and many have no idea what SA is about, what it stands for or who the president is.

“About 5 percent of the people we talk to know anything about it,” Mesanovic said.

Of the SA representatives for the College of Arts and Science, the majority are political science or international relations majors, and this leaves a large group of students underrepresented, Oliva said.

Mesanovic is a junior pursuing a degree in economics, and Oliva is a sophomore studying entrepreneurship and marketing. The pair said they would want to diversify SA representatives so that more majors are represented, such as mathematics or engineering.

Mesanovic is Bosnian, born in Germany and currently lives in Dubai. Oliva is from Barcelona, Spain. The pair said they are running in part to give a voice to international students and be a resource for them.

“Syracuse is very diverse, but in reality international students often just stick with each other because it can be hard moving past that barrier when the language barrier is hard enough,” Mesanovic said.

This group’s platform is essentially an open platform meant to represent the ideas of the students.

“We don’t believe that any view that he and I can have is a majority representation of the students,” Mesanovic said of his and Oliva’s campaign. “We think that the students’ interests definitely trump our interests. We want to give them what they want, not what we think is a good idea.”

The group said they have been carrying this out by meeting and engaging with students on campus on a personal level, asking them what they want to change, or what they would do differently. They said they would carry this method if they were to be elected.

“If we’re having a conversation with someone and they bring up a great point, then we should be bringing these students into SA meetings,” Oliva said. “They shouldn’t feel closed off from the students they’re representing.”

Published on April 8, 2015 at 12:33 am

Contact Lydia: lawilson@syr.edu