John Tudisco, Christopher Hall and the rest of Crash My Party swept student government elections this year. For student body president and vice president respectively, John Tudisco and Chris Hall won with 253 votes and 56 percent of the total votes. Cara Ledwidge and Alyssa O’Braskin won 131 votes, taking 29 percent of the total votes and James O’Connor and Andrew Padyk earned 16 percent of the total vote with 71 votes.
Questions are marked with a Q.
Answers are marked by JT for John Tudisco and CH for Christopher Hall.
Q: What made you first run in the first place?
JT: I am currently I guess you can say the junior class representative. I feel like the way it had been going was that I felt that student government wasn’t representing like the popular. We kind of just rolled from there and that’s why our main platform was to improve communication and involvement. I approached Chris first.
CH: He approached me about it asked me if I wanted to run. And I thought about it and I realized that I had no idea who was even in student government the time. Like I didn’t know who the president was. And I kind of felt that maybe other people felt that way.
JT: That’s kind of like our big thing. Not that I think that it should be a popularity contest.
Q: You mentioned that you were running on a platform of communication and involvement
JT: To improve communication and involvement. Well our VP of communication JoAnn Mullooly I feel is more than capable of figuring out things while they go on. Because there’s a few things that we definitely plan to do. I’m hoping that we can work with you guys because we were tossing around the idea of a newsletter but I think it could be even better if we can coordinate with the Quadrangle and get a little piece with you guys. I think a lot of people already read it. JoAnn mentioned this in the debate. We think that Twitter and Facebook are great tools but they shouldn’t relied on. Chris do you use your Facebook?
CH: Nah, I’m more on Twitter.
JT: I know people that have missed events because it was just posted on Twitter. What was the play?
Q: Little Shop of Horrors?
JT: Book of Mormon. I went to that and they only posted it on twitter, the lottery numbers. I have a Twitter, so it wasn’t an issue for me. I know people who didn’t. I had to check for them. I think we should through the Quadrangle or emails or I know this is something the other party was running on but
CH: Carrier pigeons.
JT: I think we could have town halls or surveys that the other party was talking about. I think they are excellent ideas.
Q: So how did you come across building your whole party? How did you pick those students?
CH: I feel like the people we picked we’re friends with so like we know who these people are. Definitely
JT: But at the same time, it wasn’t like one friend group.
CH: No.
JT: Each person was from like a different friend group. We work well with them, but it wasn’t like that it was a completely different group of people. I have reasons for each one.
Q: So how do you plan on balancing all of it, being an RA and a senior?
JT: I completely understand and I know it’s a big question. I’ve just always been someone who is very good with time management. In high school I went to school over an hour away, my bus would pick me up at 6:20 in the morning and I would get home after 7 at night because I would work. That was something that I was pushed into very young and I was just able to handle it. So I’ve become pretty good at time management. Also, when it comes to being an RA, second semester is just so much easier than the first because it becomes really more of a routine. I don’t want it to sound like something I don’t care about but it becomes a lot easier, it’s more of like a way of life so it just doesn’t take as much time. Of course I devote time to that.
Q: You’re going into your senior year obviously, so you’ve been here for four years. You’ve seen this school now, you’re an RA, you’re involved, you kind of know what’s going on. What do you plan on changing or doing like looking forward in this next year as president?
JT: Initially, we were opposed to attacking the meal plan. I felt that it wasn’t that bad and that people would have a much better dining experience if we spent our time focusing on all the little things. Like making sure there’s enough cups, enough forks, the heaters on the pizza are not burning it. Just a list of the little things that we could change that would make it better. But then, actually the day of the debate, I went to the meal plan meeting, I just heard how everything is going to change. They’re closing Leo.
CH: And Dante’s.
JT: When I came here we had 3 places with unlimited meal swipes, Dante’s, Leo and Locke’s. We also had options on what types of meals we wanted. Now, next year, we went from 3 to 1 over the course of a few years in terms of unlimited meal swipes. And there’s no options. You can only have unlimited meal swipes. I feel like that would be ok if we only went in one direction or another. It’s like if you had options, that would be wonderful.
JT: I’d like to at least set it up so that in the future years we can see some changes. Because if it stays like this for the next decade, I think it’s ridiculous.
CH: I’m honestly on board with this whole food thing though. Dante’s would be good. But, definitely more about the communication and figuring out whose really like, because once again I really don’t know who the president is and maybe if I knew what her name is I wouldn’t know who they are.
JT: We try to be approachable.
CH: You can talk to us about like whatever.
JT: We have so many other things that we were listing. In addition to the communication and talking to Mike Russell who is VP for residential affairs. We want the hall representatives, we want people to know who their hall representative is because I think that, and this actually came from Kelly Douglas during the year, I think there should be, in the front or whatever the main floor is, for us the first floor, there should be hall representative Matt miller and his picture. The RAs wouldn’t have trouble putting that up.
Q: Do you have anything else you want to tell the student body about this year going forward?
CH: I love them all and we’ll do a good job representing them.
JT: I want to school increase school spirit too. I know it’s a big thing to throw in at the end there. But we want to really do a lot with that, especially since you know we finally we went to the NCAA tournament this year. For the first time, we were just so excited for a sport, and I think we could become even more excited for basketball.
CH: I’ve seen everybody excited about our basketball team. I mean everybody.
JT: We’d like to get people to other sports too. And we’re tossing around some ideas for that.
CH: Nobody goes to the football games!
JT: Chris is the starting the quarterback too.
Q: You look at all the other sports, like baseball, and there’s only a handful of people there.
JT: Yeah well one of the things we were thinking, it’s actually not an original idea, it was actually Keelan who came up with this idea, and they never got around to doing it. This is at least what I heard. To do something like when you got to a game, tap your card and have like spirit points. A lot of other schools do that. The thing is that like what do you offer them.
CH: One idea I really liked was about Quadstock was using student bands.
JT: It would save a lot of money. If we could put that towards SpringFest.
JT: I Think what we did last year, just replace that other act with a band from Manhattan College, and put that money towards SpringFest. I know SpringFest isn’t just the budget issue.
CH: Like who Kellie Pickler is.
JT: I think that it really would be in the school’s best interest to bring back SpringFest. I think that one of the bigger issues last year was not that the fact that there was a SpringFest but the fact that the type of music was house. Everyone was kind of straying away from alcohol and going directly to hard drugs. Because I was there for two years and it was pretty wild the first year but it was nothing like the second year.
So I think that SpringFest is a tradition regardless of whether or not the concert is going on or what’s going on, so people are going to. People are going to still do stuff but I think people are going to bring their partying outside of campus. I’ve heard rumors of people going to Van Cortland Park and I think that’s going to more tarnish our reputation with the neighborhood. We should keep them on campus. I understand that there’s going to be a lot of talking with the dean over that.
Q: I just have one more question, I know you already answered it but Chris didn’t get to. How do you plan on managing everything? What’s your strategy going forward to do engineering and run the school?
CH: I’ll do it. It’s what I have to do so I’ll do it. I’m really excited about this banquet