On Friday, election results for Student Government, Inc. (SGI) were announced, prompting the new SGI e-board for the 2015-16 year.
The new SGI e-board includes ICE members Ridge McKnight as president and Dominick Salvatori as treasurer, with CORE members Sarah Hanna as vice president, Mariam Shafik as secretary, Zachary Reale as senior senator, Opiyot Kaur as junior senator and Frank Obermeyer as sophomore senator.
McKnight, Hanna and Obermeyer came together to discuss what they hope to achieve within the next months of the academic year, and how they plan to form their two platforms into one.
One common opinion among the three members includes increasing visibility between SGI and student organizations, administrators and students in order to develop greater connections.
McKnight, the newly elected president of SGI, recalled a past experience with the Resident Students Association in which the organization did not know any members of the current SGI e-board.
“The first thing I would like to focus on is really being visible to all of our student organizations,” McKnight said. “To make an effort for e-boards and each organization to know me, and to hold at least a five-minute conversation with them.”
Obermeyer, who was recently elected as sophomore senator, hopes to expand relations between college representatives and students.
“An easy thing to do would be to get all the representatives to send an email to people in their college, and to reach out to people and prompt them for questions,” he said. “To make sure the representatives know their classmates, and the classmates know who’s representing them in student government.”
Elected Vice President of SGI Sarah Hanna hopes to remodel Organization Congress, which consists of mandatory information sessions for budgeted student organizations hosted by SGI.
“I saw a lot of the struggles and hurdles that organizations have to go through such as Organization Congress and the monthly report form,” she said. “I want to revamp these two aspects of student government and make them more personal to the organization, rather than just general information for everyone to know.”
Although the election results concluded in a split ticket, McKnight, Hanna and Obermeyer are each certain that both platforms will work together to improve the St. John’s community.
“If ICE wanted to do one thing, that does not mean that CORE did not want to do that. We both want the same thing, we both want to ‘improve the college experience,’ create opportunity and realize excellence,” he said.
Like Obermeyer, Hanna believes that ICE and CORE had similar concepts that can be agreed upon.
“A lot of the points on our platforms are very similar, so it will be very easy to move forward with those ideas,” she said.
McKnight agrees. “It’s about taking both platforms and molding them into one.”
