The REAL party’s Aisha Bechir, and four Stampede party candidates – Mason Bayer, William Dong, Benjamin Lau and Jack Koscinski — secured their seats in a tight race for positions on SA’s e-board for the 2025-26 term.
Bechir will serve as SA’s president, while Bayer, Dong and Lau will be its vice presidents for advocacy, clubs and events respectively. Koscinski will be the e-board’s treasurer.
The Spectrum sat down with the e-board to discuss their main initiatives to increase transparency, communication and efficiency for the next academic year.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
The Spectrum: What would you say are the first three priorities as you get into the office?
Aisha Bechir: “We’re going through training; we’re figuring out what the expectations of our roles are. However, one of the goals we want to start working on is reestablishing trust. We want more trust between the student government and the students. A second priority would be setting up more ways to get student feedback especially regarding SA events. It’s important that before we make decisions and make events, we have to make sure that’s what they actually want, we have to reach our hands out to them.”
Jack Koscinski: “A third one would be some hirings in directing positions, as there are a lot of seniors graduating. We want to open up more opportunities for students to come and be a part of SA.”
TS: You ran as two parties, are there any main differences between your platforms?
Mason Bayer: “We’re all still going through training so we don’t really have differences.”
AB: “I think there are differences. I embrace diversity. I don’t feel comfortable in spaces where my opinion is the only opinion that is there. I want people to disagree with me. My previous party that I ran with, we didn’t all agree on certain things. I’m not gonna say that we ran on exactly the same idea. We had different amounts of emphasis on different principles. I feel like my perspective as a student leader coming into this role makes me very student focused, which may be different from the rest of them. They have a SA background while I have a more student background. I think we need those different perspectives in the same room.”
William Dong: “We ran on different issues but overall the goal of those issues was to better the student body.”
TS: So what similarities do you have?
MB: “I think the similarity we all have is the interest in the students, we want to work together and we got elected for one reason or another. We’re all grateful to be in this position, we want to work together and have the best work for the student body.”
JK: “Someone asked me how I thought it was going to be with the party divide in the office, but if you look at our policies we all ran on, it was almost bar for bar on the exact same thing. The difference was we just ran with different people that we believed we could work with. Me, Aisha, all of us have sat in a room upstairs for about like five, six hours today going through training. No one’s jumping at each other’s throats yet, so I think it’s going to be fine.”
AB: “I would say that, what we all have in common is that we are all optimistic. We’re not delusional about the relationship between SA and students, and I feel like with that optimism, we can make things better and we all share that same idea that we truly can. I knew a few of them before running and it was very clear that there were no hard feelings. I feel like I have a lot of experience working with diverse people and teamwork. I was willing to work with whoever got elected. It comes down to your determination and your flexibility of working together.”
TS: What areas do you believe SA struggles in with providing transparency and communication to students?
AB: “As a student leader, I’ve had experiences with SA where I felt left out of the loop in regards to policies that were passed. I haven’t seen any explicit effort from SA to really introduce regular students to the student body experience. Many students like myself are not familiar with how to reach out to them if there are any questions and such. There is a big gap between student government and the students, it’s not the student’s job to figure out who the senators are or what SA is implementing and for what reasons. I want to create a government that works with students and not above them. We want to make information more accessible to the average student.”
JK: “While all the information is public, it’s buried in the website and no student is going to dig their way trying to find it. While there are newsletters in PDF, no one really has gone out of their way to see it basically.”
TS: What do you think students need from SA from advocacy?
MB: “While I don’t believe that there should be any need that should come in front of another, I think they all hold a very similar value. There are different groups with different perspectives of different needs and wants.”
AB: “While it is good that you want your VP to have an ear and be a good listener, there is a lot of mistrust between a lot of UB student groups like marginalized groups whether from different religious or ethnic backgrounds, that they feel that the UB administration is untouchable or unreachable and Mason has made it a clear priority to work on that.”
TS: The Stampede ran on a platform on increasing supplemental funding, what is the exact plan and where is the money coming from?
JK: “I’ll take this with a grain of salt. As we go through training, we’re learning these internal processes. So there’s a lot that needs to be ironed out. I can’t give you an exact how it’s going to be executed right now, because we don’t know how it works at the moment. It’s going to be a while of training. We wanted to get some [SA] Senate oversight, and social voices back in the process as it was over two years ago. Not the systems they had before as it sucked up hours in senate meetings so a bridge between what used to be and what is now. Just maybe having a Senate-appointed representative to look at these requests as well.”
TS: How do you plan to redistribute SA financial resources if necessary?
JK: “Ben ran with this desire to move funding of smaller events to bigger ones, and there is merit to that idea, but going through training and learning new processes, there are going to be goals that are definitely achievable and others that are not feasible. I think ensuring that we take dollars from students to be spent in a way that is maximally benefiting the students, no matter what type of the event it is. There is going to be a bigger push for more data driven information from students polling.”
MB: “Back to the training, we can’t give an answer on where we’re going to end up with our decision regarding events at this moment. It is a case to case basis, much like a big puzzle, and we’re finding the correct pieces right now.”
AB: “I can say that the SA budget is meticulous and some expenses are overbudged and under budgeted but it all comes down to what students desire, if they participate in, and will enjoy the most. So we plan to optimize student activity based on what the data shows and we plan to move the budget around to accommodate that.”
TS: Do you feel there are going to be bigger changes in SA events?
Benjamin Lau: “You obviously want to increase input from students, so I plan on keeping an entertainment survey, but additionally, I have a plan on sending out outreach coordinators. I want them to hit spots like NSC [Natural Sciences Complex], Capen Hall, Student Union, where students are gathered because going to different buildings gathers different student perspectives.”
Amy Aracena is the senior opinions editor and can be reached at amy.aracena@ubspectrum.com
Amy Aracena is the senior opinions editor at The Spectrum. She enjoys reading slow-burn romance novels and drinking iced chai lattes whenever she can.
She can be found at @amyaracenaa on Instagram and @aaracena on TikTok.
