It wasn’t exactly the easiest two weeks, but Katelyn Mullen and Brenden Dooley can now officially call themselves the President and Vice President of UPUA. About 8 percent of the student body voted — 11 percent lower than last years voter turnout. While some may blame the low turnout this year on poor UPUA promotion, a huge part of it does come from the fact that there was only one executive ticket on the ballot. Still, Mullen was nervous all throughout the campaigning period that some grassroots campaign or some joke candidate like Sneezy the Squirrel would oppose the Mullen/Dooley ticket.

“It was always something that we were concerned about,” noted Mullen.

Regardless, both Mullen and Dooley are ready to do big things. Mullen and Dooley both agreed that the first item on their agenda was assembling the executive board.  “At this point, we’ll be working on getting the executive board set,” commented Dooley. “Then it’ll be discussing our platform and really trying to build synergy throughout the assembly.”

While I’d like to call out Dooley for using the word “synergy,” he has a point. Transitioning from one assembly to the next has been a consistent problem for UPUA in the past, so if promoting synergy is what it takes to get the 8th Assembly going, then promoting synergy it is.

In other news, there was a tie for the position of College of Engineering representative. Both Josh Pitts and Yousef Saba received an astounding 21 votes each (please, hold your applause) and will take place in a runoff election on vote.psu.edu within the next week. There were murmurs that a dance off would take place between Pitts and Saba to determine the winner, but that idea was quickly shot down by Head Elections Commissioner John Zang who apparently has to follow an “elections code” or something.

You can check out who else will be in UPUA for the 8th Assembly here. All the votes still need to be officially confirmed, however, so the number of votes that the losing candidates got will not be released for at least another day or so.