Editor’s note: All opinions expressed in this article belong to their respective author(s). Check our section “Voices” dedicated to opinion pieces on AUI Chronicle. This piece has been co-authored with Karim Bahoum.
There is no institution nor a process that evolves idealistically without any pitfalls. We usually lose purpose and get a blurry vision when walking toward greatness. It is thus only natural to see people deriving from the core of being an SGA Senator at AUI. I see these times as a great opportunity to reflect and remind myself and others of who is an SGA Senator.
There is only one quote that I picked up from Peter Parker’s Uncle in SpiderMan movie that strikes me when thinking about this subject: “With great power comes great responsibility”. This is more of a principle than just a mere quote from an action movie. Although a senator won’t be able to jump between roofs nor have a sixth sense, he or she will indeed get access to power. The power to speak up, discuss, negotiate, serve, suggest, and the ability to make students’ ideas realizable and their complaints heard. But this power brings with it thick responsibilities. The student representative should realize the moment he or she gets elected that it is the start of a journey where one needs to be the best version of himself or herself on Campus. A journey where one reshuffles his or her priorities as it is no more about the “me” but the “us”. If the representative wants its mandate to be successful, then he or she should be prepared to sacrifice time and energy. This may seem very exaggerated or ideal to be true.
Student-Centricity
Being a Senator is not just attending a bunch of General Assembly meetings, having an office and new cashwallets, and posting on Facebook groups. Let me take you through an insider view of what requires an SGA to be reliable, trustworthy, mature, and responsible. For a successful mandate, the hardest step for a senator to do is to suppress his or her ego and get diluted in the SGA as an institution. One may think that the more popular you are the more successful you are as a Senator. This is wrong and can destroy a mandate as a whole. A senator should leave his or her personal agendas behind along with biases and join the assembly as one part of the same picture. Credibility and value are recognized internally between senators based on hard work and proactiveness and nothing else.
The second step is mutual respect and professionalism. A senator comes to the first assembly with a bunch of prejudgments toward his or her SGA colleagues which is not avoidable. However, once elected the senator should not diminish other senators’ value or stand in the way of their inclusion. That person is there because students trusted him or her to represent them. Whether it is a good representation or bad representation, the senator has no right to let these prejudgments as criteria in trusting colleagues or dispatching tasks between them. All decisions should be based on transparent and open communication, qualifications, and an open mind toward harvesting the hidden potentials.
Sacrifice
The good news is that once that done, the non-serious senators fall into professional mistakes and can be impeached based on the constitution protecting the SGA and the student body. Confidentiality becomes also crucial and every senator should abide by it. A senator should bring himself or herself to keep everything a secret even from his or her dearest friends. Sometimes a senator attending disciplinary hearings is required to keep it confidential even from his or her colleagues at SGA.
A senator should also put first the good of the student body as a whole even when weighed against a dear friend getting into trouble. The representative needs to know how to switch perspectives and use empathy as he or she will find himself or herself sometimes listening to students’ complaints that they do not agree with or find trivial. His or her duty is still doing the best to serve that student as it is his or her right to be listened to and given help and support.
Being part of SGA also means that there is no more room for wrong behaviors on campus as it affects the image of SGA and its credibility. Talking about credibility, every SGA senator shall learn how to approach and communicate with the administration. It is a complicated communication process where senators should always appear consistent in front of the administration even if they have different conflicting opinions. They also need to have a great deal of patience, tact, mindfulness, repulsion management, and diplomacy.
Impact
The list of values that an SGA senator should follow is way longer than what I just wrote. The goal is to be actively working on each of them and discovering as a group more values that contribute to the success of a mandate. When one reflects on them, he or she finally realizes how great of a responsibility it is. It even becomes surprising to see candidates campaigning with means that do not serve these values. Once a candidate is aware of what he or she is getting into, he or she instantly understands that it is not about the effort put in distributing flyers, mass messaging students, going around dorms on campus, reciting previous experiences, or any other means. The only mean is the organic impact you have left on your peers, seniors, or younger students while living at AUI through showing hard work, integrity, professionalism, and kindness.
