In high school I was involved in student government. I was student body president and all that stuff and it was good,
but it was so ceremonial.
It was planning prom and putting together dances and stuff like that.
All that was fine, and we got to do some good things in high school,
we got to do a voter registration drive, which we hadn't done before, so that was good.
We were happy to do that.
But when I got here, when I got on campus
and one of my good friends, Lock Whiteside,
was an advisor for the summer African American Symposium program,
and when I got on campus this man was already running for student body president that next year,
he was actively involved in stuff like that.
I got to do a little bit of research and I realized that student government,
especially the student senate, had access to real money that people wanted and needed and that we had the power to distribute,
and I thought that was something that was completely out of the realm of what I understood about what student government was.
I realized that a lot of campus organizations,
a lot of different service projects,
a lot of different activities, were funded through student government appropriating those funds,
so at that point I said I want to be able to do some positive things in this area.
I found that student body president was on the board of trustees.
I found out that students had seats on fee committees and tuition committees where they actually had votes
that counted towards how much tuition was going to be raised, how much this particular fee was going to be raised.
I said I have to get involved with this because I think I have a strong voice that I can use to help do some positive things for students.
Ran for office as a freshman,
and I was happy to get elected that year.
There was a big ticket running against a bunch of the freshman, there was like seven people on it
and there was eleven seats, so there was a little consternation amongst a lot of us because were like, okay,
these guys are running against us, how are we going to pull this out,
and there was probably twenty-five people running.
So I just went out, went from door to door, talked to people.
I was fortunate to make a lot of friends in symposium, make a lot of friends at orientation.
Teaching Fellows was a fantastic help because there was a class of forty of us,
so that was forty people that were on my side just immediately
because I was a teaching fellow. So it was a good time, and that got me involved.
That's what got me involved in student government.