Opinion

Shaping up

The Student Services Finance Committee is back in session, deliberating over the proposed budgets of student organizations requesting segregated fees — a tax levied on tuition bills annually — and has been doing a rather responsible job thus far. The group has taken to considering bloated budget after bloated budget — many of which admittedly gained weight in expectation of slashing — as their Monday and Thursday meetings drag on late into the night.

But in this seg-fee world of obese budget requests demanding heavy-handed treatment by SSFC, we would like to take a moment to recognize one student organization that serves as a model of fiscal reason. Tonight, the budget for Polygon will be on the agenda, and their bite-sized total request of $7,200 should give SSFC members little cause to exercise their line-item veto pens.

Although this proposal is up $400 from the group’s request of last year, it is full of the sort of consideration that we would like to see more often. Polygon’s largest expense last year was Battle of the Bands, an enjoyable part of All Campus Party that the engineering group takes pride in putting on. And while Polygon hopes to continue this musical tradition, they are not requesting funds for it this time around because they “could not justify any solid academic benefit for the event,” according to the group’s treasurer, Holly Banaszak.

Indeed, it is altogether fitting that the textbook example of a responsible budget proposal comes from the number-crunching engineering end of campus, but it is nonetheless something that should be expected from all seg-fee groups. And considering that what’s at stake is nothing less than money out of students’ already-stretched pockets, this seems to be a most reasonable expectation.

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Well thanks for reinforcing this stereotype that people seem to have of us engineers being a bunch of nerds punching numbers in our calculators! Well OK, some of us are :).

Anyway, Polygon is indeed a model of fiscal responsibility that all student groups on campus should follow. The returns from their services are outstanding. Besides putting on the Battle of the Bands, they sponsor a career fair each semester that has led students, including myself, to thousands of interviews and jobs over the years.

It goes to show that students use services not from those groups that receive the most funding, but rather, from those groups that provide truly beneficial services.

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