Meet the candidates running for ASUCI’s 2025-2026 external vice president

Left photo (Jared Castaneda) courtesy of ASUCI Elections, Right photo (Adam Weinberg) courtesy of ASUCI Elections, edited by Karen Wang / Staff

Two candidates are running for Associated Students of UCI’s (ASUCI) external vice president (EVP) position: third-year mechanical engineering major Adam Weinberg and third-year political science and sociology double major Jared Castaneda. 

Under ASUCI’s executive branch, the EVP position is responsible for “promoting student advocacy on a local, statewide and national level in order to bring awareness to the importance of affordability, accessibility, quality, safety and diversity at UCI,” according to ASUCI’s website. The EVP acts as a student liaison representing student interests to the UC Board of Regents and elected officials on a local, statewide and national level. 

ASUCI’s EVP works closely with the University of California Student Association (UCSA), which serves as the overall student association across all UC campuses and is seated as a voting member on UCSA’s board of directors. A representative from the Office of the EVP sits on UCI’s Police Accountability Board.

The Office of the EVP is made up of four commissions: communications, government relations, internal organizing and external organizing. Events hosted by the office include conferences such as the Student Lobby Conference and the UC Students of Color Conference; lobby days such as Latine Lobby Day and Black Student Lobby Day; voting registration initiatives; and various informational trainings. 

Jared Castaneda

In an interview with New University, Castaneda said he was inspired to run for the EVP position because he wants to bring change to the office after seeing its strengths and weaknesses over the years.

Castaneda has one year of experience as a staffer and was a government relations aide for the past two years in the Office of the EVP. In these positions, Castaneda described responsibilities that involved lobbying representatives in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., for higher education bills focused on financial aid expansions and student protections. Castaneda also served in intern positions for the California State Assembly and the U.S. Department of Energy, and in roles on campus for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán at UCI and the UCI Office of Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. 

“Overall, these things have kind of helped me define or refine leadership skills and have allowed me to listen to a lot of student feedback — how students don’t necessarily feel supported [in] some ways, how they do and what they can see or what they want to see from the university,” Castaneda said.

Castaneda proposed three main outlets for change: solidarity and mobilization; transparency and accountability; and reinvestment.

Through solidarity and mobilization, he aims to establish a vote coalition of registered campus organizations (RCOs), tasked with “overseeing civic engagement programming, bringing in workshops and panelists and formally setting a larger push in voter registration efforts,” he wrote in his declaration. Castaneda also aims to designate a second on-campus voting center for upcoming government elections, supplemented by a local affairs position to focus on “local campaigns, politics and issues.”

Castaneda outlined establishing quarterly town halls, quarterly campuswide emails and engaging the office in club outreach. He aims to increase collaboration with ASUCI’s Office of the President to secure more funding for RCOs through the Student Programming Funding Board and with UCI Student Housing and UCI Transportation and Distribution Services to advocate for transit.

“Something that I noticed with UC Irvine is that a lot of people identify with their clubs rather than the campus itself,” Castaneda told New University. “I think having that solid foundation and kind of building that foundation with orgs [organizations] — being able to reach out to them directly and saying, ‘Hey, we have this event on voting on civic engagement. We have this teaching going on. Would you like to be a part of it? Would you like to join in on this?’ — just bringing that to the table.”

Castaneda discussed expanding the office’s advocacy strategies, such as funding mobilization efforts at bimonthly UC Board of Regents meetings and trips to Sacramento for organizations to mobilize at the state capital.

Castaneda is campaigning alongside ASUCI president candidate Alondra Arevalo; ASUCI internal vice president candidate Harshvardhan Rathore; ASUCI academic affairs vice president candidate Christopher Tan; ASUCI student services vice president candidate Patrick Kendrick Maranon; and various senators under student alliance Anteater PACT — Progress, Advocacy and Campus Transparency. 

Adam Weinberg

In an interview with New University, Weinberg said he was inspired to announce his candidacy for EVP by “experiences over the last year, where [he] just felt like ASUCI wasn’t doing enough to help students.” 

Weinberg currently serves as the corporate outreach chair for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics at UCI and told New University how this work in “reach[ing] out to other organizations — other groups — and lobby[ing] them” is similar to what ASUCI’s EVP does.

Weinberg is running alongside ASUCI presidential candidate Austin Pierce and ASUCI at-large senator candidate Sevan Minassian-Godner under the student coalition, Anteater Rising slate, to “empower the student government to help reduce some of the major issues here on campus,” such as financial aid delays and parking and transportation costs. 

“I would use my position to lobby the higher levels of power — the UC Regents, the California state government and even congressional representatives in Washington — to get them to hear about our story as students here at UCI, and to get them involved in making sure that the UCI administration, which currently does not have any incentive to improve financial aid because it improves their profits if they don’t, [is forced] to force their hand in order to properly fund and staff the financial aid office here at UCI,” Weinberg said. 

Another issue Weinberg outlined in his declaration was on-campus parking and its expenses “as more and more students are pushed into off-campus housing each year.” He wrote about his goal to lobby UCI to relax parking restrictions, the Irvine Company to expand parking opportunities for off-campus housing and the Orange County Transportation Authority to expand their bus systems for commuter students.

Weinberg spoke to New University about the lack of student awareness regarding ASUCI and the EVP’s role on campus. 

“You go up to a lot of students nowadays, you ask them, ‘What’s ASUCI do?’ They don’t even know,” he told New University. “Why don’t they know? Because they’re [ASUCI is] not really doing as much as they should.”

To increase transparency of ASUCI and the EVP position, Weinberg wants to “publish regular reports on what’s actually being done” on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. 

Weinberg acknowledged in his declaration the “many other issues that face the students at our university” but wanted to focus on financial aid delays and parking expenses due to these issues becoming “barriers that make it harder for students to focus on their education and succeed.” 

This year’s ASUCI elections are just around the corner. Voting begins online on April 14 at 9 a.m. and ends on April 18 at 5 p.m. 

Camelia Heins is a News Staff Writer. She can be reached at cheins@uci.edu. 

Edited by Karen Wang & Jaheem Conley.