A senior received a $3,000 gift from the Student Government Association, funded by leftover money from an unused scholarship, over the summer.

This summer, Executive Treasurer Ian Mandt said the executive board learned they had funds available from an old SGA student leader scholarship. The executive board met with representatives from the Office of Financial Aid, Institutional Advancement, and the SGA Advisor. SGA has not awarded the scholarship since 2008 because college policy prohibits students from seeing the financial information of other students, according to Mandt.

The SGA executive board approved Director of Financial Aid Angela Grant to give $3,000 of the available $5,084 to a current senior, based purely on demonstrated financial need, according to Mandt. The remaining $2,084 from the old student leadership scholarship will be placed in the fund for a new $25,000 SGA scholarship for seniors.

Members of the executive board—Executive President Jess Guida, Executive Vice President Raz Moayed, and Mandt—began working on the $25,000 senior scholarship last year.

Over the summer, the SGA executive board met with Grant, Associate Director of Financial Aid Carol Smolinsky, representatives from the Office of Institutional Advancement, and SGA Advisor Sharon Duffy about the new $25,000 senior scholarship SGA hopes to finalize this semester. The SGA joint session has not reached a decision about that particular scholarship yet but hopes to soon.

“We want to make sure that whatever direction we go in is the direction that the joint session is in favor of,” Mandt said.

When the $25,000 for the scholarship was set aside last year, SGA agreed on a time limit for the joint session to determine the scholarship guidelines. If they cannot reach an agreement on the guidelines by the end of the fall 2018 semester, SGA-recognized student organizations can use the money, according to Mandt.

News Editor Riane Roldan did not edit this article due to a conflict of interest.