What are you voting for in the November polls?

One of the more obvious answers is the president, but what else will people be voting for? Although very important, the president is not the only public office being filled in these elections. For Union Township voters, there is a new face running for township treasurer. Pamela Stovak, CMU alumni and professor, is running for the township treasurer position which will begin Nov. 20.

Stovak will “look at (treasurer) from a service prospective.” As treasurer, Stovak wants to keep in mind that the residents and voters of Union Township are her employer and she will work to answer the question, “What can we do for them?”

Stovak has 12 years of experience from working at Dow Chemical that qualifies her for treasurer. At Dow she worked in information systems as a system architect. Stovak hopes to utilize some of the tools and experiences from her time at Dow to help Union Township become as efficient as it possibly can.

One particular instance that gave Stovak the chance to show her efficiency was helping Dow implement a form of software asset management. They started by making sure every desktop throughout this worldwide company was standardized. The goal was to make it possible for an employee to get on a computer anywhere within the company and see exactly what they saw while sitting at their own desk. Employees were more productive and not spending their time figuring out how to use the different machine.

Stovak also worked on worldwide budgets for expenditures at Dow, which she hopes to use skills from her experiences to help with her duties as treasurer, such as tax collection and balancing of the township books.

Since her time with Dow, Stovak has been teaching for the last two years at CMU. She finds teaching to be her way to “give back to new up and comers.” Stovak teaches a business communication course that offers students all of the materials they will need after graduation to find jobs. She believes strongly in preparing students with the basic, but highly needed, tools for the “real world.”

Stovak has a feeling that the township may face new and different challenges in the future from the many changes happening in Michigan and wants to dive in face first to help.