Committee Work – A Student Voice in Institutional Governance

September 2025 – June 2026

Some of the most consequential decisions affecting UCSC's 18,000+ undergraduates happen in rooms where students are rarely present. I've spent the past year and a half working to change that across three concurrent governance roles.

On the Committee on Planning and Budget, UCSC's central budget advisory body, I attend weekly consultations where the committee advises the Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor on budget allocations, faculty hiring, enrollment strategy, and academic programming. This year that included deliberations on a $107M structural deficit and a UC-wide hiring freeze. My job is to make sure student perspectives show up in conversations that would otherwise be shaped entirely by faculty and administrators.

On the Undergraduate Academic Advising Council, the problem is fragmentation. Students experience advising as confusing and inconsistent across different offices, and the council is working to redesign it into something clearer and more equitable. I bring the student side of that experience into those discussions.

On the Core Implementation Team, I'm the only undergraduate among 13 members working on a January to May 2026 initiative to redesign UCSC's entire undergraduate advising system for implementation as early as Fall 2026. The workgroup is trying to solve something real and complicated, which is that students often don't know who to talk to, when to ask for help, or how to connect to research, internships, and academic opportunities. I'm assigned to Subcommittee 3 focused on Discipline Partnerships and Experiential Pathways, and my role is to make sure the recommendations that come out of this process actually reflect how students experience the system, not just how administrators designed it.

CPB Annual Report, 2024-25: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/wordpress.ucsc.edu/dist/2/115/files/2026/01/CPB-Annual-Report-2024-25_SCP2138.pdf