New hire, Professor Jessica Mendel, Assistant Clinical Professor of Social Work, brought on a new topic to her Social Work ll class: presidential candidate research.

The topic of the election was decided by the class and the specific candidates were decided by a survey conducted amongst the BVU student body. The survey later received 55 responses, discovering that most responses linked receiving their news to social media.

“My Prac II students did a several week long project involving many different sub assignments, culminating in distributing accurate voting and candidate information to the BVU student body,” Professor Jessica Mendel said.

Senior Dani Coyne took part in conducting research for the course. While she felt skeptical at first over the correlation of social work and the election, she found the project to be both interesting and beneficial for the class and BVU community.

“After conducting this research, part of our goal not only included finding accurate information, but also distributing it,” Coyne said.

From there, the class spoke in numerous University Seminar classes and informed freshmen about BVU’s voting trends. According to Coyne, the class stressed to the freshmen on how voting matters and they shouldn’t complain about the turnout if they don’t go out and vote.

“After researching this, I still feel like all of the candidates are saying what they think the public wants to hear,” Coyne said. “Each candidate has stances on many different topics, some similar and some completely opposite, and I think it’s important for student voters to pay attention to which candidates are going to be the best for the issues that we will be facing in the next four years.”

Mendel also believes that this election holds importance in US history.

“Trump is unlike any other candidate I have seen in my lifetime—everything about him changes the game.  Both candidates illicit very strong responses from people, and it really creates a divide in our nation,” Mendel said.

“I think this election may make or break the Republican party, depending on the outcome. We may also possibly have our first female president, which of course carries a lot of historical significance.”

Students from the Social Work course will be meeting outside of the survey to hand out pamphlets from 5-7PM on Monday and Tuesday.

Coyne hopes students will understand the importance of voting in Iowa.

“Iowa is a swing state so if we could get a large student population to vote, we could easily sway the state as a student body,” Coyne said.