Q: Year, major, hometown?

A: I am a junior. I’m majoring in public health and I just added on a minor in psychology. My hometown is Ponte Vedra, Florida.

1. How did you originally get involved with SGA?

A: My freshman year, I applied for First Year Council, and I didn’t make it. The next year I kept up with everything that was going on in SGA, and I just knew that this was something I was passionate about getting involved in. So, I really looked on the website and kept up with everything that was going on and said to myself, “How can I get involved?”

I applied to the communications cabinet, and I was the assistant to the vice president of external affairs for communications. That was a really cool year for me because that got the ball rolling for everything I’ve done in SGA so far. I was able to work on a lot of the content and graphics for everything that was going on in the external affairs cabinet. So. it was kind of my first peek at everything that SGA does to help this campus. That was an interesting year, and that was a really fulfilling role for me, and I knew I wanted to do more.

The next year, I applied to be on the executive cabinet, and I got director of engagement, which has been such an amazing role to be a part of. With engagement, you are sort of the liaison between SGA and a bunch of underrepresented organizations on campus. So I would have the role of speaking to these organizations, getting in contact with them and saying, “We want to market your events and let people know what amazing things are happening on this campus, what your organization is doing.”

Engagement was just a lot of meeting people and really working with organizations to partner them with SGA so we can become more united as a whole, and I just love that. I was really inspired by all of the people on the [executive] council and cabinet who just were always looking around the corner and challenging themselves to really see what they could do to make this campus a better place. And I knew I wanted to continue to be involved and continue to move my way up on SGA.

So when secretary opened up, that’s also a role where you’re dealing with all the different branches of SGA and different organizations. People contact me all the time and are like, “Who can I talk to about this? Where can I go for this? What do I need to do for this?” And different branches will say, “Hey, can you help me out?” and send out a mass email. So that’s what I really liked about secretary. […] You get to work with everyone. You’re not just stuck to your own cabinet or anything like that.

I just applied and went through the interview process and ended up getting it. It’s been really, really rewarding so far. It’s been a good couple of weeks. There was, like, a brief transition period, sort of, where we didn’t really have a secretary, we just had people filling in. So a lot of what I’ve been doing now has been organizing everything that was just left in the transition period.

Q: What made you run for this position?

A: I really wanted to run for this position just because I saw things while working on other positions that I wanted to change. I saw that the way that things were being communicated could improve. I think that we have a lot of room for improvement in how we communicate and coordinate the flow of information from the different departments of SGA back to the executive council.

I never want there to be an instance of where someone goes up to someone on SGA and asks, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ and they don’t know the answer. I want people to be informed and educated on everything that we’re doing to make this campus better. So I was really just invested in changing the mindset of how we can communicate to our own members and internally reorganize, rework and restructure ourselves so that we have a more open line of communication, we’re more efficient and we’re productive so that we can serve campus better. I am just really passionate about helping all my peers on campus. I knew that through this position I would be able to affect some sort of change on campus.

Q: What makes you the best choice for the office?

A: I think I’m the best person for the job because of the experience that I had. Like I said before, I’m really passionate about SGA’s mantra, which is ‘students serving students.’ I have seen so many people in SGA make really positive changes on campus, and I wanted to be a part of that. If I’m secretary, every single day I’m going to do specific tasks that will make everything in the long run run more smoothly. I think that I’ve done that so far, and I think that I have worked hard to reach out to people and say, ‘What do you need from me?’ because I’m here to be sort of a support system for everyone so that they can do the best job that they can.

I think I’m capable of making as much change as the rest of my peers, and I think that the role of secretary, a lot of times, people think it’s just an afterthought or it’s just something that’s not super relevant. But behind every great boss is a great secretary. There’s a lot of scheduling, organizational things and really internal things that people don’t really see. If you really go out of your way to make it into something more than it is, you can really change how things run.

Q:  What’s the biggest problem you see on campus?

A: I think one big problem that I’ve noticed on campus is I think students are really stressed a lot of the time. I think they really struggle with time management, and I think that affordability is a really big issue for a lot of students, and that contributes back to stress. There’s a lot of things that SGA has done and will continue that will help that.

With affordability, one of the points on my platform that I want to focus on is revamping and reorganizing the alumni database, which is something from a record-keeping standpoint I can do in order to increase those SGA-alumni relations and improve that thing that we’ve been working on so that we’ll have a more open line of communication with our alumni, who in turn will make major donations and have made many donations to the SGA need-based scholarship fund. The problems on campus are something that I see, and I always think of how as secretary can I use record-keeping, organizing, planning, scheduling to help students and make this process less stressful for them. This University has given me so many opportunities. I want them to have those same opportunities to excel and really enjoy their time here on campus.

Q: What do you hope to change?

A: I really split it into three broad areas. Within these three broad areas, I believe there are specific things I can do every single day that will help these three areas improve. My three areas, they’re like the three A’s: accountability, application and alumni.

For accountability, I think there’s a lot that can be done to improve the accountability of SGA. Whether that be revamping SGA 101 at the beginning of the year, holding more SGA-wide meetings, improving how we communicate. Accountability will improve with the next point, the application process.

This year we had phone interviews, and it was just a quick application process. I want to go in and look at how we’ve done the application process in the past and improve it so that we’re doing on-campus interviews this year and create a standardized rubric. So have, like, three questions that we ask everyone and three questions that will be sort of what we want to hear from the people applying to our SGA. Once we improve that, we’ll be able to be a lot more accountable, so those two points kind of go together.

With the alumni database, I just really want to go in and work on all those records, getting those organized, so whoever works on it in the future can really easily communicate with them so that we are able to increase our funds and help our students.

Q: What’s one last thing you want voters to know about you?

A: What I want voters to know about me is that the job of the secretary, and this goes with any job on the SGA, is what you make of it. You can be as involved as you want. The more that you do and the more that you branch out and really try to branch out and put yourself in the mindset of how I can serve my campus, you will gain so much more from being involved with SGA. This goes with any campus organization.

I want voters to know that as secretary, I will pour in all my time and effort into being the best secretary that I can be and maybe going beyond what people will think the secretary really is. I think that the secretary does a lot of work internally that people don’t really know or hear about, but it’s so that SGA can run more efficiently. I will do things every single day. I’m in the SGA office all the time so that my SGA can run in the best way. I’m going to go above and beyond of the basic requirements of the secretary.