Graduate Student Association Elections

Bshaer Alharazi enjoys volunteering especially social events. She applies for any opportunity that allows her to meet new people, offers assistance, and exchange experience. As a newspaper reporter for the UQU university and a PR representative trainee, she got the opportunity to share ideas, improve her communication skills by listening to numerous speakers, and appreciated how they told their stories to deliver various messages to readers. The great goal of building our nation has been in front of her eyes, especially since receiving a scholarship from the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Higher Education for Arkansas Tech University (ATU); she lived in Arkansas for two years while earning her master’s. Beyond coursework, she has diverse training and internship experience. For instance, she was quite active during grad study and has participated in giving back to the community through volunteer groups.

Alharazi served as vice president and social media editor of the Saudi Student Club at ATU and when volunteering in social events presented Saudi Arabia to other students from other countries. At UCF, she will be serving with the Odyssey Ambassadors Group allowing her to present her educational knowledge and communication skills and letting her leave a fingerprint with UCF international students. Alharazi believes being elected as the Graduate Student Association President will allow her to enjoy the involvement in a new community and gain new experience.

Giovana Potiens

Giovana Potiens is an international student from Brazil and a two-time Knight! She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in Finance from UCF in 2019 and is currently pursuing her master’s in Data Analytics. Potiens considers UCF her home. She has always been very involved on campus with jobs, RSO’s and mentorship opportunities. She currently works at UCF Global, where she is responsible for the English programs’ financial operations, and is excited about her new role with the UCF Knight Vision project!

Potiens uses her experience as a female international student in technology to advocate for underrepresented groups at UCF and mentor others. She is currently the International Student Association Vice President and chair of the Odyssey Ambassadors Group, serving as a student advisory council and liaison to the UCF Office of Diversity & Inclusion and the UCF community.

Potiens has been representing graduate students at UCF as the GSA Vice President for the last two semesters and is proud of what GSA has done to better serve UCF graduate students. She has had an important role in hosting professional development guest speakers’ workshops, open forums, networking sessions; launching a GSA website, and securing two different scholarships available exclusively to graduate students.

Vice Presidential Candidates

Wendy Keith

Wendy Keith is a nontraditional student and single mother of two. She is currently a Cognitive Science Graduate Certificate student looking for the right doctorate program to research cognition within the therapeutic arts. She is transitioning from an Orlando Health Integrative Medicine Cancer Support Community internship as a therapeutic artist for patients and their caregivers to a volunteer. In addition, she is a professional artist and teaches English to Chinese children online. Her professional goal is to provide support to the cognitively different community through Therapeutic Art practices. She has had the privilege at UCF to be a teaching assistant for the Psychology Departments Capstone course and a research assistant for their career readiness study.

Before coming to UCF, Keith was an undergraduate SGA Public Relations officer and then the SGA President at Lake Sumter State College. She was a productive and successful SGA Officer by using my multi-tasking ability between work, education, and personal duties.  She has over 15 years in retail and customer service management. She has developed strong leadership skills and remained positive, productive, and poise demure during all situations. Her education, drive, and community focus give her the tools to be a productive and dependable Vice President. Keith wants to be a team player and advocate for her UCF student community and its diversity by supporting and supplying resources to achieve academic success while having a fulfilling student experience.

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Lauren Rouse

Lauren Rouse is an educator and a scholar, one of her largest focuses is the experiences and representations of people of color, transgender and non-binary persons, and persons with disabilities across media. This focus translates into her work as a political organizer and president of her doctoral program’s student organization, where she has taken steps to change the deeply systemic issues within academia that prevent those from disenfranchised backgrounds from ever achieving goals in higher education.

As Vice President for the Graduate Student Association, she wants to work with multicultural offices across campus and in Orlando to hold space for and learn how to better support those students, especially first-generation students, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ+/BIPOC students. She also wants to plan Pathways to Success workshops that teach other graduate students how to discuss diversity, inclusion, and decolonization in their own classrooms and research, and promote the tenets of the UCF Creed (Integrity, Scholarship, Community, Creativity, and Excellence), through teaching and scholarship.

Rouse (she/her) graduated with her MA in English from DePaul University in 2019. Her research in the Texts and Technology program focuses on the rhetoric and discourses that fans use in online communities, specifically in conversations about and fan works on disability, mental illness, and neurodiversity. Her other research interests include platform studies, Black feminist scholarship, and queer theory.