Winner of the Losers

Obviously, I am trying to be sarcastic here. I repeat to warn that this should in no circumstances be interpreted as humor. 7 votes. 7 more votes were all it would have taken to get me elected as an ASR Senator. And yes, I would be lying if I would say it’s fine and that it was just an election. I was very passionate about this ASR and I felt strongly about the issues that I had raised.

I do not know how much legitimacy or authority I will have as a common Trinity student but I would like to push for my ideas nonetheless. The severe inadequacy of institutional positions at Trinity is one major issue that I would want to bring to the attention of the concerned authorities. I am not very sure if this kind of dichotomy between institutional positions and federal work-study positions exists at other colleges or institutions too, but I would be surprised if it did. I remember randomly surfing through some of the elite universities websites to browse about summer opportunities and I had stumbled upon their human resources websites where several students were wanted for various kinds of positions and none of them made any distinction about the citizenship of the student. What conclusion I drew (it could be an immature and early one though), was that such universities must have decided to stick to their equal opportunity ethics and allocated their institutional funds for hiring students without capping the maximum amount.

To keep these kinds of workings internal is a good decision in many ways. First, the university shows that it truly values equality and equity. Trinity’s human resources website proclaims in bold letters, “Trinity University is an Equal Opportunity Employer.”
I stared at this statement for few seconds and started thinking about it. True. It is true that Trinity does not discriminate against students while employing them but the number of positions available under institutional aid acts as a disguised discriminatory force. Foreign students have to compete fiercely to get those scarce positions so, how can this be justified as equal opportunity? To access the available institutional positions at Trinity, you would have to go all the way to the bottom of the Human Resources website which lists 4 or 5 positions at most compared to scores of federal-work study ones. The nationality of a student determines the chances of getting an on-campus employment more than any other factor such as how well prepared or how suitable one is for that particular work.

Anyway, let’s hope the authorities will receive this matter positively and things will change for better.