When I started telling people that I was the incoming Student Government Association (SGA) President, the first thing a lot of people asked me was “What’s that?”

And honestly, I couldn’t blame them.

I’ve been involved with student government since the first semester of my freshman year, and I’ve loved every single second of it. I’ve been able to meet amazing, driven people, understand the who’s-who of the college, and be part of a team that’s done some really remarkable work. 

But my biggest grievance in these three years, without a doubt, has been the lack of visibility and transparency between SGA and the greater student body. For all the good work SGA does, we’ve done an incredibly poor job of publicizing our achievements and sharing them with the student body. We weren’t really telling people outside of SGA what we were doing and, likewise, the student body did not know what SGA did or why we existed. Even our senators felt lost at times. This was evident in our low election voting turnouts, dwindling attendance at our General Assembly meetings, and confused looks on student’s faces when they saw us at the Org Fair. 

In running for President, I wanted to help change that.

Over the summer, the Executive Board—consisting of myself, Vice President Kayla Armbruster, and Treasurer Oliver Katz—met regularly on Zoom with our advisor, Jenn Nival. During these meetings, we set visibility, transparency, and engagement as key priorities for this school year. Having determined these overarching goals, we brainstormed little ways to bake them into our everyday work, because change is easier to accomplish in small increments than huge, sweeping movements. 

We tackled visibility and transparency in a few ways. One route was reinstating a marketing department for our Internal Affairs team. Having seen the negative impacts of its absence on our engagement, we brought on some amazing people to help us change that. Over the course of this semester, the marketing department has helped revitalize our Instagram account, routinely posting a variety of content, from General Assembly reminders (with themes!), to reposting student organization events, or fun content of us enjoying our time at SGA. It feels great to see people and organizations tagging SGA in their posts, and even better to see our own Instagram up and running.

Our next approach was through concrete interactions with our student organizations. During the first month of the semester, we looked at how we could increase engagement with our affiliated student organizations. Amid a flurry of ideas, Kayla and I came up with an interesting idea: What if we met with every single student organization on campus? 

Was it a crazy idea? Definitely. But it was different, and different has been what we’ve desperately needed. 

With that, we set out separating all 98 (yes.) student organizations into smaller categories that we could more easily tackle. After creating 12 rough categories, we set up a weekend-long office hour-style calendar. Each category was assigned a set day and hours, during which their leaders could come in and talk to us. Not just as student org leaders, but as people. We had some structured questions—their organization’s purpose, goals for the year, how we can help them, etc.—but we also just got to know each other; why we joined our orgs, our plans for the weekend, what our favorite Max orders were, anything you could think of. Over the 16 hours we spent in our SGA office, we met with a large majority of org leaders and learned about (some of) the amazing people that make our campus community so vibrant. We got to understand these orgs beyond just the money sum we give them each year. Rather, we got to know the incredible people who make them so amazing, and gained a deep appreciation for the wide variety of purposes these organizations serve. It also gave us valuable insight into what mattered to each of them and how SGA could do more to support them. While it may have been unorthodox, it helped us interact with student orgs, and we gained invaluable insight into how we can better serve our community.

As for engagement, we decided we needed to help give our senators guidance and motivation to drive change and make them excited to be in SGA. The first issue was handling our dysfunctional rules. Our Chief Justice, Georgia Winn, spearheaded the push to create a new constitution, a daunting task with tight timelines. With help from our Deputy Treasurer, Angus Abercrombie, they condensed a nearly 30-page document into nine, removing a string of redundancies while giving us the clarity, flexibility, and structure we needed to govern as an efficient unit. It was ratified during our Fall elections, and served as a testament not only to their hard work, but to the commitment of SGA to functioning as a stronger collective. Beyond that, we’ve also begun implementing a new, uniform project proposal template for all of our senators to succinctly identify what issues their constituencies are facing and how they can fix it; be it in a month, a semester, or a year. While we’re still working out the entire onboarding process, we’ve already received an array of incredible ideas from our senators, across various departments and identities—a testament to the amazing people we get to work with, and the potential that this group has.

I could go on and on and on about all the cool stuff we’ve worked on over the course of this semester, like the guest speakers we’ve brought in, the fun events we’ve done, or the plans we’re developing for the $1.4 million Student Impact Fund, but a 1,200 word count can unfortunately only cover so much for an entire semester.

But this isn’t going to be a semesterly thing. This is the beginning of a new column I’m starting, labeled “Letters from the President.” Every month, I’m going to give you an honest, candid review of what we’ve been up to in the past month, the amazing work of everyone within student government, and how I think we’re fulfilling the long-term visions my team and I have set for SGA. 

I’m not going to sugarcoat things with buzzwords and eloquent diction. I’m not going to regurgitate the same words you’ve heard 70 times over. I’m not going to bullshit you. What I am going to do is tell you exactly what SGA is doing, how we’re doing it, and why. Because SGA’s purpose is to serve the student body, and for all the trust you place in us, transparency is the least we can and must do. I’m here to show that being SGA President does not make me different from you or anyone else. Your SGA representatives are people just like you, and SGA cannot do its job properly without you. All of you. All of us.

I’m very thankful to The Beacon for giving me this opportunity, and I humbly welcome you all to join me on this journey into the rest of the year.