If you saw Jonathan Kaufman standing in line at Carolina Cafe, chatting with two people he's never met before about their biggest concerns on campus, you'd find it hard to believe he was pretty introverted in high school.
Nonetheless, he stood in line, asking two strangers, “What’s the most important thing to you? What can we fix on campus?”
It came as no surprise to him that they both complain about campus parking. He laughed as he pulls out his phone to show them USC Probs, the highlight of his platform.
The third-year Spanish and political science student's campaign is based off of this collaborative effort to establish a platform with the student body.
“There’s a huge variety of ideas and the reason for that is that they’re not mine,” Kaufman said.
The ideas come from the students themselves — USC Probs offers students a way to voice their concerns and see real-time results through the form that Kaufman has worked up.
“It’s our job to go to administration and represent the student voice and then come back and tell them what they said,” he said. “To push as hard as we can to make real change, that is going to improve the student life.”
That’s why his platform is made up of several ideas — Kaufman said the Facebook page and form will help show students that Student Government is working on their suggestions.
While at USC, Kaufman has tried a little bit of everything, from vice president of the Carolina Homeless Outreach to a Service Saturday site-leader, volunteering at a hospital to University Ambassadors and Student Government.
His roots stem from his father’s origins in Maryland and his mother’s South Carolinian family, so Kaufman was raised with traditional Southern values in Fredrick, Maryland.
He thought when he came to USC he would be seeing a lot more of his biological relatives, but he found that he established a new family where he felt at home.
“We feel the spirit. You feel it Saturday at Williams-Brice,” he said. “You feel it when it’s a snow day and there are a thousand people throwing snowballs for two inches of snow. It’s almost impossible to describe, but I think that the best way to do it is family.”
Kaufman said he hopes it will be through the ideas his "family" offers him that he'll nab the student body president seat.
“It’s not about me — it’s about the ideas,” he said. “These ideas matter to me.”