With preparation for the fall presidential debate underway, the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement is beginning their voter engagement efforts by appointing staff and researching how to best reach out to students.

Part of this research will take place when Cassie Klosterman, a graduating senior and the Institute’s recently hired voter engagement fellow, and Ashley Chiu, a sophomore who applied to join Klosterman, attend the 2016 College Convention.

Gephardt Institute officials hope that the convention, which will take place Sept. 9-10 on the Dominican University campus in California, will allow them to better focus their efforts on student engagement to increase both turnout and awareness.

“We are interested in registering people to vote, and we will be actively involved in that,” Gephardt Institute director Stephanie Kurtzman said. “We also want voters engaged in the issues and learning about what they’re voting about and the voting process.”

In order to achieve this goal, graduating senior Klosterman was hired, and it was decided that she would attend the convention with a student selected from a pool of applicants. The two would learn how to better engage the campus community and use their knowledge to promote political involvement on campus.

The chance to attend the convention attracted “very strong interest,” according to Kurtzman. Chiu herself saw the opportunity as simply too good to pass up.

“I’ve always been interested in politics, and this year, especially, it’s just such an exciting time,” Chiu said. “I think everyone’s pumped up, especially with Wash. U. being the host, so I just figured why not—it’s probably a once in a lifetime opportunity. So, I just went for it, and it worked out really well.”

Klosterman hopes to work closely with Chiu to take the lessons of the convention and apply them to Washington University’s campus in the fall.

“We’re really going to work together as a team to make sure that voter engagement is a presence, not only physically on campus but also on social media, because that’s one of the big priorities of the 2016 College Convention,” she said.

These initiatives will largely be put into action through the Washington University votes committee, which coordinates various student groups on campus to both program around the debate and get students out to vote.

“There are, it seems, countless national initiatives around voter engagement, particularly around college student voter engagement, that we want to tap into. This college convention is one of them,” Kurtzman said. “We’re also looking at the research on what we know nationally about how and why college students vote. Not [who] they vote [for[, but how they make the decision to vote or not vote.”

Although only 41.2 percent of college students voted in the 2012 presidential election, Chiu remains optimistic about Washington University’s potential.

“I know the stereotype is that millennials don’t care about politics or that young people don’t vote, but I think having been here for a couple years and [having talked] to a lot of people I can say that’s not true,” she said. “I think people really do have strong opinions on a lot of the issues and are definitely looking to be engaged.”