USU Candidate Profile: Ada Choi
Pulp interviewed all 10 candidates in the running to become USU Board Directors. Over the next week we’ll be posting a profile on each of them in the randomised order drawn by the Returning Officer. Here’s Ada.
Name: Ada Choi
Studies: Master of Commerce (Marketing and Business Analysis) I
Faction: Independent
Colour, slogan, and campaign manager: Coral, Ada-vance, Yolanda Bai
Ada Choi is the only postgraduate in the race and the only first year. She has started at USyd in the midst of a pandemic, meaning she has had limited interactions with the USU. When we asked her what her favourite USU outlet was, she could only name the USU building and store. Her one experience with the USU was Welcome Fest, which she says motivated her to run (as well as a friend telling her to).
Ada’s lack of experience and knowledge about the Board was very clear throughout her interview. When we asked her what she thought the USU was doing poorly, she cited the lack of an Annual Report as a flaw in transparency. Awkward, because Annual Reports along with Financial Reports are available on the USU website, and you would think a prospective USU candidate would have tried to find them.
When asked about how the USU should engage with controversial clubs like LifeChoice, Ada’s answer was equivocal: she did not know whether abortion was legal in New South Wales and said she would simply consult “the schools’ policy”. Perhaps most concerningly, she did not know the number of Directors on Board. In answer to a question about how she would deal with conflicts on Board, she said “We have 10-12 directors” who could resolve the situation. The Board consists of 13 Directors.
Ada’s policies are brief. She wants more USU membership benefits and discounts, saying that she would “select really popular independent outlets, restaurants, bubble tea shops” to obtain discounts and free delivery. When we asked about whether there are any companies the USU should avoid on principle, she was unable to answer. She says she would have to refer to past decisions (presumably rather than any ethical commitments).
She’s also proposing the establishment of an online second-hand bookstore for students to buy and sell textbooks. When we asked how this would differ from existing second-hand book outlets like Zookal and Student VIP, Ada could only say that it would mean students could “have all options at once” rather than having to browse the internet, which is presumably the purpose of any online bookstore. Ada also wants to introduce a food ordering system allowing students to pre-order food and pick it up from USU outlets. She also believes the introduction of delivery around campus could be a good measure to respond to COVID-19.
Ada is an apolitical candidate, who claimed not to have “a clear picture on how Australia has different political parties at the moment” and instead committed to representing “80-90%” of students. Whenever we pressed on how she would prioritise different members of the University community or even the University and USU members, she reverted to a majority-rules perspective.
One point of difference between Ada and the other candidates is that she is a postgraduate, potentially giving her a unique perspective to bring to the Board. She mentioned in her interview that she had studied on a number of different campuses, again giving her some unique experience. However, she struggled to specify any ways in which postgraduate students could be better included in the USU. She acknowledged that postgraduates often have to balance work, which means they go on campus less frequently. Confusingly, her only suggestion about how to engage them more was to refer to her policy about ACCESS Rewards so that they’d get better Rewards off campus.
Ada’s level of knowledge in our quiz, which occurred only 30 minutes after her interview, showed surprising improvement. Due to internet reasons, Ada declined to turn her camera on, meaning we could not effectively supervise her taking the quiz. Somehow, despite not knowing about the USU’s Annual Reports in her interview, she knew their revenue in 2018. Despite, in her interview, not knowing how many Directors there are on Board, she was able to name the Senate Appointed Directors and the Board’s Executive positions. Even though she struggled to name her favourite USU outlet in her interview, she curiously knew five outlets (in the order they appear on the USU website) for the quiz. She somehow knew the name of the ticket which won last year’s Sydney University Law Society election, despite not being a USyd student at the time.
Perhaps the strangest of her answers was to the question: Which former USU president appeared on reality TV? What show? She wrote: “Noelle Cockett, abc news”. We googled it, wondering if this was some My Kitchen Rules contestant who’d escaped our notice. No. It turns out Noelle Cockett is in fact the President of a USU… But not this USU. She’s the President of the Utah State University, who we assume at some point has appeared on American news. How Ada managed to arrive at this answer, we cannot say.
Ada’s quiz score of 70% was incongruous with her level of knowledge in her interview. Perhaps it is the result of 30 minutes of frenetic research and a photographic memory? We’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Overall, Ada is perhaps the least qualified candidate in this year’s Board race. She is running with minimal interaction with the USU and limited (although highly variable) knowledge of it. She lacks a clear vision for what she would like to achieve on Board and who she wants to represent.
View her full video interview here.
Note: Pulp Editor Ellie Stephenson is a former member of Grassroots.