New SAC Chairman talks importance of student groups

College junior Vinay Rao was elected the new chairman of the Student Activities Council on Thursday night. Rao sat down with The Daily Pennsylvanian to outline his vision for SAC.

The Daily Pennsylvanian: What are your goals for the coming year?

VR: I think the couple of things that always seem to strike a chord with groups is the whole debt issue. … We started Debt Committee, we’ve been working really closely with the [Undergraduate Assembly] as well as [Office of Student Affairs] … It’s just about trying to figure out why groups got in debt, start[ing] a committee trying to understand what can help groups from not getting into debt because a lot of the time debt’s not the problem with the group at hand. It’s debt that’s occurred years and years in the past.

DP: What made you decide to run for chairman?

VR: I think just, generally speaking, it kind of comes down to why I ran for SAC in the first place. Student groups at Penn are probably one of the greatest things, I think, on this campus. … There’s literally so much diversity and so much passion amongst the students, and I just want to be a part of an organization that allows students to follow what they love to do.

DP: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing SAC in the coming year and how to do you plan to tackle them?

VR: Always a big problem is getting funding. I think last year was a great year for SAC. We got a pretty substantial percent increase in the funds for SAC to distribute among student organizations. … I think the second biggest thing is that the SAC funding guidelines are coming up for renewal, actually … It’s going to be my board who looks over and reviews the SAC policies and see if they’re still applicable for organizations today, and how we can tweak them to make them better.

DP: What would you like to see SAC do differently?

VR: I think just being as clear as possible is probably the most important thing SAC can do.

I just think a lot of student groups come into SAC that are especially new, that don’t really understand how the funding policies work and that’s just because they’re tough. There’s tons of them and who’s going to sit there and read files and files of policies?

I think the best thing to do is try to create some sort of way to break it down to student groups, and we call this “new student group education.” ... That’s probably the thing that we need to improve on. We’re going to find ways to make sure groups understand our policies so that they can properly ask for the money and get the money.

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