U. students elect first minority chief

While other University of Utah students spent their spring breaks at warm locales or ski slopes, Ali Hasnain and John Poelman holed up at school, hammering out plans for running student government next year.

The newly elected duo couldn't afford a fancy vacation, anyway. They spent all their money on the campaign to win office, Vice President-elect Poelman said.

Hasnain will be the U.'s first minority president of the student government, known better as the Associated Students of the University of Utah. He was born in Seattle, but his parents are from India. Despite his seminal win, Hasnain insists that his administration will be focused on the needs and wants of the majority of university students.

"We did it because we felt like we could represent the entire campus," Hasnain said. "I may not inherently be a part of a certain demographic or a certain mainstream, but that doesn't mean that I don't understand the importance of the populations that make up the campus or that I won't work as hard as humanly possible to represent those populations."

Hasnain, Poelman and Lissy Largin, who is senior class president-elect, ran under the Students First party. As might be expected, their platform emphasizes input from students for everything from an indoor campus recreation center to lobbying the state Legislature for smaller budget cuts and tuition hikes. But it could be a tough sell.

On a campus of more than 28,000, only approximately 5,000 voted in the 2005 election, and it's traditionally difficult to get more than a core group of organizations involved in ASUU decisions.

Hasnain thinks he and his colleagues are up to the task. Evidently, so do the students.

"Over the last four to five months that we've been planning and producing this campaign, we've been asking for a chance to be in the position of responsibility that we've now been entrusted with," Hasnain said. "The real work begins now."

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E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com