It’s a long ‘un. TL;DR? Tagg, Sean, and those other guys. But you really should read on for more details and lulz, you lazy chump. Oh, and hopefully this doesn’t cause as much Twitter drama as this endorsement did. WE ALSO MADE A POLL! It’s totally scientific, you guys. 

Board of Governors

Let’s get one thing straight here: UBC’s Board of Governors (also known as BoG) is a big fucking deal. If you’re elected, you get to shmooze with the best of UBC administration, go on fancy trips to the Okanagan, and meet important people that are good for networking opportunities post-graduation. PLUS! You even get $5000 and an iPad.

In theory, this is also where students can do the most bestest awesome work. If it’s a Big Issue you may or may not have heard of, it’s been up before the board in the last year. BoG sets policy for the university at the highest levels of administration, i.e. they decide what direction the university is going in and how to get there. Students can have a huge impact on these decisions—or they can have a huge impact on their resume. Ideally, both.

Here are some buzzwords you may have heard: land use. Governance. Summer semester. Just trust us—they’re important, and the BoG reps are the people who represent what “students” think about these things to the super important people.

Lots of the candidates this year have similar platforms and some people think you may just be voting based on personality/popularity or whatever. But look, this one issue has people with different opinions! We called them all up and made them answer on the spot – if housing was to be buildt in Gage South (the area near McInnes Field, which is where the bus loop is now), what percentage should be student housing? Here’s what they had to say, in the world’s ugliest graph thing ever.

BUT ALSO YOU guuuuyyyyyyyyyysssssss. You should probably care a little bit more about this. You should probably read, in full, the interviews Issues That Matter and The Ubyssey did with these candidates. [Ed. note: Really, just pick up the latest issue. It’s so pretttyyyyyy] You should probably carefully review their platforms. Or you could skip to the pictures, after the jump.

Most years, the BoG race is cozy. This year, six super hacks ran, which made our decision that much harder. But internal votes were cast, and we’d like to introduce you to our latest obsession:  Tagg Jefferson.

He’s like a cross between our 2010 Dreamboat Johannes Rebane and our 2011 Dreamboat Sean Heisler. Tagg has been super-involved in niche areas of campus (read: engineering) but has yet to really break into the mainstream hack scene, which we think is a good thing for this position. But he is super researched, smart, and reminds us of a young Sean Heisler – someone who could really grow into this role for a while. He also speaks Japanese. And has won a lot of awards for his super cool invention/business called Dragonfly that tests water or something like that. Future millionaire, snatch this one up.

 And now, for the most experienced candidate: Sean Cregten, king of all Confidential Memes (sorry, Ben). Sean broke onto the hack scene by running as Admiral Ackbar in the AUS Elections and WINNING against REAL candidates. He sat on AMS Council for a bit before becoming the Associate VP Academic, where he worked for two years under Ben & Matt. He knows his shit, he is seriously a force to be reckoned with, and look! look! He made a challenge to the other candidates.

P.S. He also wants to give us a WEATHER-PROOFED BUS LOOP, eliminating bad hair days forever.

Other People Running Who Are Not Terrible 

Don’t like our endorsements? That’s cool! Pick one candidate from each category!

[Editor’s Note: We had totally pre-judged Sumedha based on just seeing her at one BoG meeting. But after talking to her about Gage South, we kind of want to endorse her too. So if you don’t like Tagg, or Sean, or like Sumedha more, then vote for her. She knows what she’s doing, is smart, and obviously cares about students.]

Bad Cop: Matt Parson is experienced, hacky and got some serious love from Serious Outgoing BoGger Sean Heisler. We’d go so far as to say that if you don’t vote Sean, you should vote Matt. BUT if elected president, he won’t get to be in the room on governance decisions, and that’s a Big Fucking Deal. Nevertheless, you can still vote for Matt; he’ll just have to be all Sophie’s Choice. Do you really want to hurt him like that?!

Good Cop: Mike Silley, like Matt, is also experienced and hacky, and has an interesting lower-food-costs item on his platform. Sumedha Sharma is running for re-election…we’ve only observed like, one BoG meeting, but she wasn’t exactly enthralling [NB: On BoG, this isn’t exactly a bad thing.] But hey, her boyfriend made an album full of memes about her, and she also got the Sean Heisler nod. Justin Yang is awesome, but honestly we just think he is too nice to be on BoG (update: apparently he has claws! You go JYang, you go!) On the other hand, he’s got major academic cred. Total research nerd. Also, a major force on Senate, so who knows?

People Running Who We Don’t Think You Should Vote For

This guy. He sent us this. Okay, yeah, that’s pretty funny.

BUT—we’re sorry—there’s no such thing as “borderline sexism.”  It’s kind of a binary, like pregnancy.** Same goes for homophobic jokes, prolifically using the word “retarded” along with other lewd comments. And no amount of campaigning nor promises to engage with students can make us want to send this guy, who thinks it’s okay to say these sorts of things, into the top student position on campus. Even Tucker Max has kind of outgrown this shit.

**Do not send us links about how pregnancy is not a binary

 

This post was written by everybody! Everybody voted in our secret internal ballot, and not always in the way you’d think.