By KATHLEEN QUANDT

Staff Intern

Free tuition, financial aid for immigrants, and leadership skills were just part of what was on the agenda for three members of the OUSC at the 40th Annual USSA Legislature Conference/Lobby Day in Washington D.C. last week.

Hawra Abogilal, and Jarrett Schlaff, both Oakland University Student Congress legislators, and Janelle Arbuckle, OUSC’s public relations agent, were picked for the four-day trip, covering March 21-24. This is a yearly event in which representatives are sent from student congresses from schools across the country.

During their stay, they lobbied for free tuition, lowered and the Dream Act, which would help people who are not citizens receive financial aid loans through the government and become citizens, Arbuckle said.

“Our main purpose for meeting with our representatives was to ensure that the money allocated for higher education in the President’s 2010 fiscal budget will continue to be seen as a priority,” Schlaff said. “We were there with one voice, the voice of the students, throughout Michigan and across the country lobbying for access and affordability of higher education.”

The trip included attending workshops.

“These Workshops ranged from how to be effective leaders to getting students involved on a commuter campus. Our delegation met with the House of Representatives, Gary Peters of the 9th district, the chief aide to Senator Levin, and accompanied other students from Michigan to lobbying visits with their representatives,” Schlaff said.

“We had a bunch of workshops on pretty much how to improve student congresses, as in getting to know one another or even as far as financial aid,” Arbuckle said.

The conference/lobby day helped them become more involved with external affairs, which there is not a committee for at Oakland University, but some other universities have a committee for, Abogilal said. She said going put what they are doing as part of OUSC into perspective. While in Washington D.C., they met a lot of people from all over the U.S. and used this opportunity to find out what kind of policies they work with, she said.

“We got to network with schools from all over the nation and learn about the way they ran their student governments,” she said. “One of the things that struck me was that some of the schools had external affairs committees where the members will address student issues with local politicians.”

Both Arbuckle and Abogilal said that going to Washington D.C. was a great experience where they learned a lot.

“We were made more aware of issues that students were facing on both a national and local level and how to go about addressing and tackling these issues, and I believe this is what made the program worthwhile,” Abogilal said.

“It made me want to bring back to student congress a lot of the issues we learned about,” Arbuckle said. “On Student congress we focus on university issues but there are so many national issues that we should also be focusing our attention on as well.”