Nam Woo Yi (ME M.S.-Ph.D. integrated course) was elected as the 2nd student president of graduate school for 2013 on Jan. 3. The Postech Times reporter asked him online what Postechians are curious about.

1.The election of student president graduate school was delayed due an absence of candidates.
First of all, thanks for your attention to the Graduate Students Association (GSA). I participated in GSA last year as an executive member and saw many possibilities. For that reason, I wanted to support GSA works as an executive member of GSA this year just like last year even though I need to focus on my research a little more to qualify for an exam and complete my Ph.D thesis proposal this year. However, after I heard that there was no candidate for the president, I thought that if one year passes without the president, many issues and problems, which should be solved, will be delayed. Thus, I decided to run for the student president of graduate school.

2. For the 2nd round of GSA, what kind of problems did it have and will it face in the future?
The biggest problem is that there are still many Postechians who don’t know the existence of GSA. We will try to advertise our activities much more actively and open many roots to easily access our services. The second problem is the Student Association Fee. All students had to pay the Student Association Fee last year. However, it is optional this year. So we worry that Student Association Fees will not be sufficient to support our needs. This would make it difficult for GSA to conduct activities and effectively represent graduate students. I want to ask Postechians to support GSA by paying the Student Association Fee.

3. What are the key issues that you will treat this year?
The first thing is to make a casebook of human rights violations in labs. We will collect the cases that violate human rights and make a book including some guide lines. The second thing is to establish a tentatively named “POSTECH Clinic.” Graduates always face the danger of experiment and their body condition is not well due to their experiment and irregular life cycle. However, Graduates should pay some money to get comprehensive medical tests and international students should go to the hospital with Korean for translation. To prevent these kinds of drawbacks, KAIST established and has operated KAIST clinic since 2011. KAIST clinic supplies the medical test for free and international students can also go to the clinic without Koreans. We thought that it is a very good system, so we will try to establish something similar.
In addition, we will also deal with issues about scholarship, RA (research assistant) ship, TA (teaching assistant) ship, and dormitory problems.