For the Student Government Association (SGA) leaders, change has become the norm over the past year. As Ashley Adams was elected the fourth SGA president in 16 months Aug. 2 following a summer of upheaval, the e-board is prepared to settle in for a complete year of work advocating for students.
Adams joins Executive Vice President John Guilfoil, Vice President for Administration and Public Relations Adriana Campos, and Vice President for Academic Affairs Michael DeRamo as newly elected SGA officers.
“We’re getting everything ready for the fall. Come Sept. 1, we’ll be ready to hit the ground moving. We have events every night during Welcome Week,” Adams said.
For the fall, Adams said SGA would focus primarily on reaching out and recruiting more students for the organization.
Recruitment was a major issue last year for SGA. Membership was down due to a similar e-board controversy that pushed deep into the fall. As a result, e-board members said they were unable to focus on encouraging new students to join.
Although Guilfoil won re-election as vice president for administration and public relations in April’s initial election on a platform that highlighted freshmen recruitment, his successor, Adriana Campos, has plans of her own for the fall season.
“We want to not only make students feel welcome, but we also want them to know that students make us powerful, that our organization is the students,” she said.
Campos said she would also focus on dislodging the perception among students that SGA is focused mainly on maintaining its credibility and is “exclusive.”
“What we’ve found is that students don’t know how willing we are to work for them,” she said. “What we want them to know is that we work for them and we are the students.”
Campos, a middler political science and journalism major, has served in SGA for three years. She had run for vice president of administration in the Resident Student Association in March, but lost that election.
Campos is not the only new officer attempting to remake the face of SGA.
Guilfoil, as vice president for student affairs, said he would also attempt to make good on SGA’s reputation by ushering in three new student groups at a Student Affairs Board meeting today.
He said the groups have been waiting for months to receive approval, recognition and their entitled student group funding from the tuition-based Student Activities Fee.
“We’re really confident. We’re complete, and we have a united e-board with [the elections] behind us,” Guilfoil said.
Of the new e-board members, DeRamo is the member with the least experience. He had served in SGA for only two semesters prior to being elected, but was Adams’ assistant vice president for academic affairs.
DeRamo is currently at home in Michigan, where he was during the election, as well. He plans to return next week.
“I feel ready,” he said in a phone interview from home. “Over the summer, I was in contact with the e-board every day, and I’ve been in contact with President Adams every day since then.”
For the fall, he said his main focus would be to take on the task of revising the SGA- sponsored teacher course evaluation forms, a long held project of the senate.
Rogan O’Handley, one of two e-board members who did not see his position shuffled after the special election, said the whole process taught him a lot about his fellow student leaders.
“I’ve learned a lot about this organization, that the leadership truly are dedicated,” he said. “There’s no personal interest. They’re doing it for the student body.”
