Martel's S/STEM TRAIN Blog (4/28)

 This week I was still in the process of putting the finishing touches on my project. I've also had to spend a good deal of time studying to prepare for finals in all of my classes and other responsibilities. 

Last week, the Student Senate met with the MCCCD Office of Public Stewardship and Legal teams to learn more about proposed changes to the district Common Pages Catalog. The Common Pages Catalog contains district wide policies and regulations that have a great impact students and employees in Maricopa. This year, many proposed modifications were brought forward. The Student Senate worked hard to review over 50 pages of documents to give well-considered feedback on these proposals. As always, we tried our best to keep the interests of the students at the forefront during this process. In the end, we supported many of the proposed changes. But, offered constructive criticism of a few others. For example, one of the proposals this year was to do away with Student Conduct Boards to handle accusations of student misconduct on campus. The proposal states that these boards should be replaced with a Student Conduct Administrator. We argued very strongly that the interests of the students would be best served if these kinds of allegations were evaluated by a group of individuals from different backgrounds and positions in the MCCCD, including students, faculty, administrators, and others. I sincerely hope our feedback is taken to heart. Know that the Student Senate is working hard to fight for your interests in the district and if you have a passion for improving the experiences of the 93,000 students currently enrolled in Maricopa, consider joining the Student Senate of another student leadership position on campus. There are many ways for you to get involved and help to represent the interests of the students.

Today, I received two Ursa student achievement awards at PC for my work in the Student Senate and PC United. I
appreciate being recognized for the work I've done and contributed to. So, a big thanks to PC for extending this gesture.

Martel's S/STEM TRAIN Blog 4/14

 This week I received more guidance from Matt on how to preform some important functions in Excel. I also have done a good deal of web surfing on my own to find ways to perform certain calculations that are important for my project.

On Tuesday, I and another Student Senator met with the CEO of the Maricopa Scholarship Foundation and a team of other top executives at the foundation to advocate for our scholarship proposal for the Women Rising and Male Empowerment Network. We both prepared very thoroughly for our meeting and I think our work payed off. The meeting went very well and the Scholarship Foundation team seemed excited by our proposal. Hopefully this will bring us one step closer to offering these important scholarships to the students at Maricopa.

Martel's S/STEM TRAIN Blog (4/7)

This week, I spent most of my time for this class analyzing a large data set for my experiment. I'm currently using Microsoft Excel because I don't have much experience with other statistical programs. This has its own challenges, since performing some statistical functions in Excel can be burdensome. But, I've been scouring the internet for resources to help me overcome these challenges. 

So far, I'm made some significant progress. But, I still need to master a few more functions before I can finish analyzing this data.

This week, several Student Senators met together to prepare for a presentation we are giving to the Maricopa Scholarship Foundation next week. We have developed a proposal to establish a substantial scholarship for the "Women Rising" student organization, which has chapters on all of the Maricopa college campuses. If we are successful in this, it will mean a major boost to the "Women Rising" organizations and will hopefully motivate other students to join this incredible group. We have determined that over the next several decades, this scholarship will be able to impact the lives of several thousand of students.