Sophomore Caucus: Daniel Jung and Ryan Lee

Record: 2

While the candidates’ lengthy bios expound in great length upon their respective accomplishments, Lee and Jung have little in the way of relevant experience outside some minor leadership roles in robotics and Key Club.

Campaign: 4

Their online presence is impressive, with a website, social media accounts, and a well polished Google document outlining their ambitious platform.

Platform: 2

While the Lee-Jung campaign’s platform is impressively sized, with the document stretching to over 50 pages, it contains a lot of fluff and unrealistic policies with little targeted specifically toward the sophomore class.

While their platform uses a metaphor about a bridge and its supporting arches to express their campaign’s sentiment more elegantly, the Lee-Jung campaign’s messaging seems largely centered around amplifying student voices. In some ways, their campaign really hits the mark. Ryan Lee and Daniel Jung's online presence is impressive, consisting of a website that is relatively easy to navigate and packed full of content, various social media accounts, and a well polished Google document outlining their ambitious platform. They even have a YouTube channel in which they explain their various policy initiatives, all presumably in an effort to deliver on the accessibility that they promise potential voters. Their platform goes in depth on each policy, emphasizing their “research” and including potential challenges, benefits, and solutions alongside each proposal.

That being said, the actual policies themselves leave much to be desired. While the Lee-Jung campaign’s rhetoric is adamant in their pursuit of involving and serving more sophomores in caucus activity, this doesn’t seem to be reflected in the policies they’ve chosen to run on. Many of the ideas detailed in their platform leave much to be desired. In some cases, the policies are merely extensions of existing SU projects and are entirely dependent on the SU’s cooperation. Often these policies don’t seem to be directed toward helping the sophomore class specifically, and what’s more, most seem to fall well outside of the reasonable capabilities of the sophomore caucus. Specific policies that come to mind include the proposal to secure more discounts from neighborhood businesses for sophomores and acquire umbrellas to be rented out to students, both of which either are already being implemented by other organizations like the SU or have been discussed by them. What policy initiatives that remain are very similar to what many other tickets have proposed, such as hosting online events and curating study guides for sophomores to use. Some of these ideas are good, such as requiring teachers to make their lesson plans public, but not unique to their campaign. And even the better of their ideas seem to feature certain flaws in their proposed implementation, like the proposed $3-$5 charge for students to attend online events that might not even require an upfront cost.

These kinds of issues aren’t particularly surprising, considering that while the candidates’ lengthy bios expound in great length upon their respective accomplishments, Lee and Jung have little in the way of relevant experience outside some minor leadership roles in robotics and Key Club. Their lack of experience in student government isn’t a deal breaker in and of itself, but it seems clear from the flaws in their platform that they don’t have even the basic understanding of how caucus operates that might make up for it.

While Lee and Jung have some admirable goals, we believe that their inexperience coupled with their lack of understanding of the role and capabilities of Sophomore Caucus would hinder their ability to serve the sophomore class, especially in these strenuous circumstances.