As co-chair of the new Initiative task force, Dartmouth Medical School student Andy Mengshol, will play a key role in the next step in the Initiative process by representing the graduate student voice.
Mengshol will co-chair the Student Response Task Force with Student Assembly president Dean Krishna '01 and Dean of the College James Larimore.
In this position, Mengshol will be responsible for making sure the voice of the graduate student body is heard by the Board of Trustees on the issues addressed in the steering committee's recommendations report.
Mengshol, who is pursuing studies in the molecular and cellular biology MD/Ph.D. program at DMS, said he is confident he will be able to accurately represent Dartmouth's 1,400 graduate students. He was selected to the new task force because of his position as co-president of the Graduate Student Council.
"The role of the task force will be to consolidate student ideas and opinions gathered from meetings and pass it on to the Trustees without any filtering," Mengshol said.
Mengshol also said the basic idea driving the new task force is to make sure that students feel the process of collecting feedback on the report is fair, and that their opinions are being heard.
After recording student opinions on the recommendations in the steering committee report, which was released last week, the new task force will write a comprehensive summary of campus-wide thoughts on the pertinent issues and deliver it to the Trustees before their final Initiative decisions this spring.
While the task force has not yet met, Mengshol said so far he has no complaints about how the process has involved graduate students, but said more of them need to show support for issues such as better graduate residence space.
Echoing popular sentiment among students, Mengshol also cited the lack of social space as an important issue.
"Getting rid of Webster Hall was hard for graduate students, and scheduling things in Collis is too difficult," he said.
Mengshol emphasized the shared interest of both graduate and undergraduate students in creating more places to socialize, noting that graduate students have parties, too.
Speaking with a thoughtful confidence, Mengshol acknowledged he is optimistic that the steering committee's recommendations will enact positive changes at Dartmouth.
An avid skier from Fresno, Calif., Mengshol attended UC-Davis before coming to DMS.
