Three teams for the ASOSU Presidential/Vice Presidential tickets are gearing up for the crucial and exciting 10-day campaign.

Simon Brundage and Rhadika Shah, Jacqueline Logsdon and Josey Koehn, as well as Hunter Briggs and Hevani Fifita have officially announced their candidacy for the highest office in the executive branch of OSU’s student government.

Brundage, a third year engineering student, and second year environmental law student Shah, met while working at the West residence hall. They were talking about the national presidential election when the ASOSU election came up.

“We had that conversation about ‘Man, it would be actually really cool to run for those positions and actually see if we can be the change we want to see,’” Brundage said. “It was very much a mutual coming to terms with it, and neither of us really approached one another.”

“We just started talking more and more about it and did a lot of planning over Winter break and just got super excited through that time,” Shah added.

Shah and Brundage have different histories with working in student government.  

Brundage has been involved as a proxy for the ASOSU Senate, and was in the House of Representatives his sophomore year.

While Shah hasn’t had student government experience with Oregon State University or past schools, she has an ‘outsider approach’ and experience built lobbying the government in her home state.

According to Shah and Brundage, the key word to their team and their main goals in their campaign is transparency.

Another team in the running for the presidency and vice presidency are fourth year environmental economics and policy student Jacqueline Logsdon and second year speech communications major Josey Koehn.

Koehn explains how the two of them met and became a team through the helpful connection of social media.

“My freshman year here, Jacqueline sent me a message on Facebook asking me to volunteer for  a bit with the Vote or Vote voter registration campaign,” Koehn said.

“I don’t think Josey gives herself enough credit. Even from the moment I messaged her on Facebook with the Vote or Vote campaign, I knew it was going to be something she’s good at,” Logsdon said. “It kinda sent us on this road where we went from being acquaintances to just becoming friends.”

They too have different backgrounds with student government. Logsdon has been the assistant director of government relations, where she plans her own events and organizes around issues and ideas. She has enjoyed these past two years of having had the opportunity to support the students of Oregon State.

Koehn started with student government as her high school student body president, and with that experience knew she wanted to be more involved with government positions.

Logsdon and Koehn main platform planks revolve around accountability, environmental issues and to bring back positions for those ideals.

The third team running in this year’s election are second year philosophy student Hevani Fifita and third year ethnics studies major Hunter Briggs.

Fifita discusses how the two became a team after knowing each other from the Diversity and Culture Engagement center.

“We work really good together and we have a lot of the same values and goals, so we ended up deciding to be a team,” Fifita said.

“We are both in a sense the student leaders who collaborate the most, and from doing events together we realized that we can get a lot of good stuff done,” Briggs added.

Fifixta comes into this election with no previous experience with student government but she has a background in collaborating with ASOSU for events involving DCE.

Briggs follows along in the same lines with being involved in the DCE and has also represented the district school board and was involved in the election process at his high school.

Fifita expresses her and Briggs main idea for their team.

“At the end of the day this is student government. For students, not just for a place for you to go and talk with some faculty and not really listen to who you are supposed to be doing things for,” Fifita said. “So that is something we really want to do is really get in there and talk and be there and see people’s faces and see them in person instead of just reading their names on a piece of paper and emailing them.”

The campaign period lasts all of Week nine and right up until Thursday of Week 10. This upcoming time is solely for these candidates to spread the word, voting begins on Thursday Mar. 9 and ends Friday Mar. 10.