SGA president encourages involvement in student government

Since being elected SGA president in April, Lindsey Pierce has been working hard to ensure the senate is ready for the new year, particularly in their outreach efforts for student involvement. SGA has been a priority for Pierce since she joined freshman council.

“I heard about SGA my first night at MTSU,” Pierce said in an interview with Sidelines. “The president at the time, Coby Sherlock, was speaking to freshman girls about getting involved, and me and couple other girls were interested. I had an interview the next day. I was excited but had no idea the impact it would have on my collegiate career.”

Pierce’s interview with executive vice president, Rachel Lee, went well and she was a member of freshman council. Since then Pierce has served on freshman council where she presented her first legislation to the SGA senate, an at large senator, SGA secretary for the senate and secretary for the SGA office.

Last year during elections Pierce was considering running for a different position when the current SGA president showed her the wall that holds the pictures of all past SGA presidents.

“He took down the frames that held the pictures of the three previous women presidents,” Pierce recalls. “And he said, ‘Lindsey, you could be the fourth one.’ This kinda registered with me and I believed I could be the next one.”

Pierce ran and won the election, fulfilling her goal to be the fourth woman president of MTSU’s SGA.

Pierce says the biggest challenge for her in being president is the reality that she is the voice for over 23,000 students. Which is why, she says, the main focus of SGA this year will be to expand the outreach efforts to get more people involved with SGA.

“It was disheartening for me to hear while I was campaigning how many people had not heard of SGA,” she said. “And if they had heard of it they didn’t know what it was about.”

Pierce hopes to change that this year through various projects she and her executive board are working on.

The first project will be overseen by Madison Tracy, vice president of marketing. She is launching a social media campaign this semester entitled Humans of SGA which will highlight various students on campus and what they are doing.

Also, Pierce aims to send her senators out to present SGA to the 320 student organizations on campus. During these presentations the senators will not only talk about SGA but get feedback from the students.

A third outreach will be student appreciation week in November, during which SGA will hold various activities and events to make students feel appreciated for being at MTSU.

“We are working hard to reach out to students,” she said. “By getting feedback from our students to our senators, and also through follow-up.”

Finally, one of Pierce’s personal goals is to keep SGA diverse so all students’ voices are heard. This year there are veterans serving on senate, she said, and also graduate students and various organization leaders.

After Pierce finishes her presidency and graduates in the upcoming year, she plans to pursue her master’s in higher education. Her goal is to eventually work for a university in student affairs, the office that deals with all the non-academic aspects of students’ education, such as SGA, student programming and judicial affairs.

Pierce said she has been so strongly impacted by people in this department she hopes to have the same impact on other students in the future.

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To contact News Editor Sarah Grace Taylor, email news@mtsusidelines.com