The Southern sat down with Student Government Association President, Corey Koch, and asked him about SGA’s plans for this semester. If you have any further questions for SGA, contact them through MocSync or attend any of their Town Hall Meetings
Q: What are you looking forward to the most this year?
A: I think what I’m looking forward to doing the most is setting up a more succinct system. We have different policies and initiatives that you might notice change from year to year, and sometimes there’s a little turbulence associated with that because as always, when we’re going to do something different, something that you don’t know, it could be more difficult just to adjust. These policies tend to be pretty fluid and what I’m looking to do is revise bylaws so that way we have a little bit less fluidity and organizations can know what to expect from year to year instead of it changing. Really, what I’m looking to do is set more of a system in place so that way people have better expectation from year to year of the operations of SGA.
Q: Are there any major changes SGA plans to make in their operations this semester?
A: One of the things Ebony Ramsey, the director of student involvement, has been looking into is having some sort of judicial process through student government. A lot of other schools do such a thing, but we do not.
Q: Will the grant process for organizations be updated this semester?
A: One of the things we’ve already started to do, (which you may have seen in the Blast Off packets) is we’re changing the grant process a lot. We’re going back to the first-come-first-serve basis and we’re also continuing to work with the MocSync software, but were looking at different maximums for individual category. There’s travel, event and operational grants and those numbers are a little different then they’ve been in the past, and there’s different reasons for that. Last year, 37 campus organizations requested over $57 thousand for spring budgets and we had $6 thousand to allocate, it was a really difficult thing to do. This semester we’ve upped the budget for allocation to $9 thousand, so we have a 50 percent increase in the amount of money that we have available to students. We’re also tightening the budget for what it is that different organizations can be pulling, those limitations can be fount in the Blast Off packet.
The goal is to make sure every organization can operate and then we can look into more extravagant expenses after that. Those are $8oo both for event and travel grants, those are the limitations per academic year and also $150 for operational.
Q: Do you have any advice for anyone looking to get involved in SGA?
A: With the way with our system works, you basically have to be elected in order to do anything with student government, unfortunately something else we’re looking into. The best thing to do to get involved, I would encourage anyone with ay level of interest to go ahead and run in these elections. They’re more than welcome to contact me or anyone else on the Executive Committee and we can give advice as to which elections tend to be more competitive, because every year we have a few seats where only one person runs or some that none run for. For example, the first year senator position- it’s traditionally 12 people that run for four positions. Really just jockeying people around in different areas of the Senate can A: fill the Senate and B: get more people there to help up out with all the exciting things we have to do.
