The new Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) president is a fan of the pakoras at Mike’s Place, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), Students Against Israeli Apartheid, and campus unions.
“God, I’m such a lefty,” Christina Muehlberger said with a laugh, explaining her PhD research.
Though in the past the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) and GSA haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, Muehlberger said she thinks there’s room for the undergraduate union and the GSA to work together.
“Next year is a new executive. I don’t want to go into it with the idea there’s naturally going to be conflict,” she said.
Relations between the two student unions have been been punctuated over the last two academic years with two separate lawsuits, one filed by each union against the other.
Muehlberger said she’s prepared to follow in current president Grant MacNeil’s footsteps, but she needs to review the details on all the issues before commenting.
“Their judgment has been spot on,” she said. “When the interests diverge, you need to make a call. The call is graduate student interests.”
When it comes to graduate students and campuses, Muehlberger said she is experienced.
After finishing her undergraduate degree in political science at Acadia University, she came to Carleton to study commercialization and campus environment for her master’s in political economy.
Now she is working on a PhD in sociology and as a research assistant.
Muehlberger said she was never political as a teenager. She imagined university would change that, but was surprised when she found Acadia non-political.
She said it’s the lack of activism on campus that mobilized her.
“I’m energized by it. I think students have so much that they can be doing and are doing. And I want to be engaged in those movements,” she said.
Muehlberger said she wants to make sure the GSA supports graduate students in their studies and in the community.
Part of her platform involves re-launching the GSA’s website with a graduate student blog that will help new students adjust to life in Ottawa.
She said she wants to set up a student-supervisor advocacy service to train graduate students on how to resolve conflicts with research supervisors.
Muehlberger said another goal is to lobby Carleton’s Board of Governors to freeze tuition rates, especially for international students, whose fees are unregulated.
“We have really good ideas that we want to see happen, so we’re going to push for it,” she said.
Muehlberger won with 279 votes, more than triple the number of the opposing candidate.
She will take office in May 2014.
