By Vineeth Vaidyula
During 12/12’s PSA biweekly meeting, the President of VCU, Dr. Michael Rao, spoke with us about his work, his journey, and his advice. He started with the pandemic and how it has affected his perspective on how virtual instruction and work can function. He wants to make VCU course instruction more palatable to students' needs, because students are tired, students are busy with co-curricular involvement, and students are human. He empathized with students because he too was once a teenager trying to find himself and what he wanted to do in life, and he believes that all students should be afforded this opportunity when it comes to remote learning. For VCU, he believes this means working with VCU’s departments to develop a list of remote learning standards for classes dealing with online assignments and lecture videos. He also asked for our experiences as students and anything we could add to the table. For example, many of us stated how we would like to have recorded lectures that we could go back to as we’ve realized that recorded videos allowed us to rewind, pause, and even speed up lectures to our liking, allowing us to feel less exhausted and more ready to learn. President Rao also talked to us about dining at VCU, including the lack of vegetarian options. As a vegetarian himself, he understood not only how having limited vegetarian options was problematic for students to maintain healthy, well-balanced diets, but he also understood how cross contamination of vegetarian and non-vegetarian utensils and cooking-ware was also an issue as well. All in all, it was great meeting President Rao. Instead of holding a lecture-style discussion, he opened up the floor to us ambassadors to empathize with us and learn more about the positives and negatives going on in our lives at VCU. As a Presidential Student Ambassador, I can’t wait to have more conversations like these.
