The University Graduate Student Association elected its executive officers for the Monday evening, with one nominee for each office.

Ali Kefeli, re-elected UGSA president, said the GSA representatives of each department nominate graduate students for each executive officer position.

“The nominations are open to everybody, but we prefer to have people who have been with UGSA before serve in these positions,” he said. “That’s why we didn’t advertise it to the whole graduate student body.”

According to Kefeli, for the five years he was involved in UGSA there was always only one nominee per position.

Alex Hummel, elected vice president internal, said graduate students aren’t as likely to take volunteer positions as other people might be.

“Graduate students tend to have a million things on their plate at a time, so taking on additional responsibilities tends to add more stress to their lives that they maybe cannot mentally handle,” he said.

The UGSA vice president internal is a position analogous to the Student Government Senate president, he or she organizes the standing committees, maintains organizational order and makes sure paperwork is filled.

“I want to organize better rules of order for our chamber. If there are no rules of order, things can turn into a shouting match,” Hummel said. “But if the rules are too legalistic, people tend to get confused and shy,” Hummel said.

Hakan Karagul was elected vice president external, which is responsible for finding graduate students to attend standing committee meetings.

Karagul said the standing committee seats were not all filled this year and he hopes to get all those positions filled next year.

“It’s important to find graduate students to fill seats,” Karagul said. “It’s the connection point for the graduate students to the rest of the University.”

Karagul said the UGSA executive board is working to make UGSA a member organization of the National Association for Graduate and Professional Students to discuss national issues facing graduate students and the solutions attempted by other school.

NCSU’s 7,000 graduate students automatically become a part of UGSA when they enroll at the University and are charged a fee of about $14 per year, according to Kefeli. The UGSA’s budget is sustained by these fees and its projected budget for the next year is $81,055.

Zack Kenz, elected UGSA treasurer, said he is looking forward to serving the graduate students.

“It’s important that money is being spent on things that will benefit the students,” Kenz said.

According to Kenz, the UGSA treasurer doesn’t have as much power to abuse as another organizational treasurer might because a lot of items in the budget approved by the UGSA council are fixed and the same from year to year.

“Our costs are fairly predictable, which will make tracking reasonable,” he said.

The UGSA plans to finance travel and thesis grants, TA Awards, social events, the annual Graduate Research Symposium and to allocate money to each GSA department in an appropriations process called “chapter rebates.”

Kefeli said his goals for next year as president include increasing the involvement of the UGSA in graduate student careers in the University as a whole.

“I want every graduate student to have had some sort of exposure to something that we do for them,” Kefeli said.