President's Messages
Message from Lance Polivy
NYU Law SBA President
September 2012
Welcome, NYU Law School!
This is an exciting time of year for the law school. 1L's are settling into a routine after their first cold call in Civ Pro. 2L's are starting to wrap up interviews and are busy with journal work and running all of our student organizations. 3L's are taking in their last year before confronting the real world and LLM's are exploring all NYU has to offer. The SBA wants you to know that wherever your find yourself in the law school community, we are here to make our school work better for you.
Law school can be hard. Our mission at the SBA is to make life as a law student just a little bit easier. This year we’ll continue to push for the kinds of student and facilities projects that we accomplished over the past year while increasing transparency in our processes.
At the first Dean’s Meeting of the year, where the SBA met with Dean Revesz, and members of each division of the Administration, we led off the agenda with a discussion of diversity and gender parity. We had success this past year in increasing gender parity but there is still more to be done. Helping to increase the diversity of the law school will be a top priority for SBA throughout the year.
Last year, we were able to implement a number of school improvements. We got a community refrigerator, new chairs for the library and computer/phone chargers to rent. Other student life projects in the works include some simple IT fixes like improving the wireless Internet. We understand that sometimes it’s the little things that can mean a lot to your student experience. We will expand the therapy dog program from a few days before finals, to include days throughout the semester. Also, we’re going to continue the process of re-designing the Kushner first floor lounge in Vanderbilt to be more conducive to studying and hanging out. Plus our basketball team beat Columbia for the fourth consecutive year in the Deans Cup!
Most importantly we’re working on transparency and accessibility. That’s why students get a weekly update with the day, time, and location of SBA meetings and will have access minutes from past meetings. We filled all 21 slots on the student-faculty committees to give students a greater voice. Those committees will continue to serve as an outlet for student input in the decisions that shape our community.
To that end there are a lot of ways students can get involved. If you have an idea for how we could be working to improve the school, shoot me an email at lance.polivy@law.nyu.edu or come to an SBA meeting. Looking forward to a great year together!