The next president and vice president of the University of Minnesota Undergraduate Student Government (USG) for the 2023-24 academic year will be Shashank Murali, a third-year student, and Sara Davis, a second-year student.

The campus election results were released on March 27. Murali and Davis won about 84.5% of the vote for USG president and vice president.

Murali currently serves as USG’s chief of staff to the president and Davis is a ranking representative to the Board of Regents.

The two sat down with the Minnesota Daily to talk about their experience and goals heading into next year. Murali and Davis want to focus on campus safety, increasing transparency and getting more students connected with University resources.

What are your main goals going into next year?

Murali: “I was the co-chair of the Campus Safety Committee last year, which has now transitioned into a task force for this year. So working with city council members, working with the state government to find funding and improve our campus safety has been a huge goal, and we’re gonna continue doing that next year as well.

As any student advocate would want, [we want] to reach out to students to find more ways to include students in everything that we do. Not just include them in the advocacy process but also provide ways for students to connect with each other. We have a new volleyball tournament coming up, so that’s going to be super exciting to provide a way for students to come together. We have Greek life involved, we have different student organizations as well. We’ll have just regular students with their friends wanting to come in and participate, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I think that’s incredibly important, and it brings together our human community.”

Davis: “Personally for me, throughout this year I have learned a lot about the transparency within the University, and so I’m currently an author of a resolution tackling that and that’s an issue I’m personally passionate about. We’ve seen that in how it affects student groups with the Student Services Fees funding process. I think we’re really committed this upcoming year to reforming that and making sure that really works for student groups and it’s accessible and transparent … We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that it’s really inaccessible and inequitable.

And then I think broadly of health equity, and I’m including a lot of different things in that. We’ve got an initiative to get Plan B more accessible in the University. We’ve got one vending machine so far, but we want to get a few more, and then also just [increasing] access to menstrual health products around campus.”

How will your prior USG experience help you succeed as the president and vice president?

Murali: “For me, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of so many different positions in USG and at different levels as well. I’ve had that experience within the legislative side of USG, and then this year, I’m again the chief of staff to the president. I’ve had the opportunity to work more internally and see how the internal organization structure works and how best to optimize it so that we can be successful externally for students.

And I’ve also been able to act as the representative to the Student Union and Activities Board of Governors, which in itself is a whole new level of advocacy, working on different things related to students, more University central related stuff. I’ve had very many broad experiences, and I think that’s incredibly important coming into this role to understand how different aspects of the job work so that we can figure out what’s the best vision and the best direction to take the University.”

Davis: “My connections with the regents I think are going to help us a lot in this process. I got to really know the governance systems at the University, so I think something that’s interesting about the University of Minnesota specifically is that we’re very decentralized. So there’s a lot of people that have decent input to the process, but don’t maybe necessarily have as many connections with students. I think bringing all of those pieces together and highlighting that these are the people who do the work that we as students care about. ”

How will President Gabel’s resignation and the University’s search for a new president affect USG during your term?

Davis: “I think this is definitely a real time to get the University administration to see the really broad depth of the things that students do and what students care about. We have a really engaged student body that has a lot of things that matter to them, and I think if we have students that are involved in this process, the administration will really be able to see what they might not necessarily see right now.

That’s something really important that we can highlight, as well. Like Shashank said, our advocacy work doesn’t pause just because there’s an interim president. I think it’s also making sure that we choose an interim president who is going to prioritize students and the issues that we care about.”

What are you most looking forward to in your roles?

Murali: “We have a lot of ideas we want to implement to help USG be better for all students in general. It’s about navigating that and to, you know, figure out what we can change within our organization so that we can best reflect students, and so that we can be better prepared to serve students. We have our ideas, we want to do things a little bit differently than previously, and that’s something that I’m very excited about.”

Davis: “I’ll echo everything Shashank said as well, but something I personally really loved about the USG work that I do is being able to really learn about the University. There’s so much that, because of our experience and what we know, we can say to students like, ‘hey, look at these resources, look at these things.’

We’re at a perfect time to be able to really connect students with the University more and kind of blow that whole process wide open. And I think that’s going to be something that we focus on, and we’re both really excited for it as well.”

This interview has been edited for length, style and clarity.