Well the senate president is a job.
I mean you have an office, and at that time-and I think probably it's still true-
the university actually paid for full time administrative assistants for the student senate president and the student body president.
So at a very young age
all the dynamics of running an office came into play,
managing personnel, and this is not something you typically do at that age,
and there were some bumps in the road there too. It's a learning experience as well.
So a lot of the responsibility had to do with managing the process of the student senate itself,
the flow of legislation, of bills, resolutions, that sort of thing,
making sure they were all introduced properly, scheduled, you had to build the schedule for every senate meeting.
I think in those days we met every other Wednesday night
and so you're in front of the room standing behind a podium managing sixty-some senators, all of whom want their time to speak,
all of whom want some attention, all of whom want to have their say,
and to try to do that in a way that's fair and that everybody feels good about is sort of hard.
You're having to focus on the good of the group a lot more than your own
ideology or the direction that you want to go.
Well I've always liked that role, you know, the lieutenant governor of the state presides over the state senate,
the president of the student senate presides over the student senate,
and I kind of liked the process and the order and those sorts of things,
so as a sophomore I decided to run and
we ran in the spring for the subsequent year.
So in the spring of my sophomore year is when I ran the first time
and had a spirited campaign.
I had an opponent who I knew well and liked a lot, we got along very well.
I haven't looked at it lately but I think the Technician editorials commented that we
seemed to get along better than most political opponents, but it was because we were friends.
We were both student senators and thought a lot of each other so we had a very polite campaign.
Campaigning was fun. I'd never really campaigned for a job before.
It's elected student body wide, so you're running a campus-wide true campaign,
speaking in residence halls at their council meetings, going to fraternities and sororities,
really going through the motions of a campaign.
There was no online voting then so there were polling places everywhere, a lot of manual signage
you had to create and put up, so it was a lot of work
and it was fun, but I also enjoyed the job and ran for reelection and served almost another full year.