COLUMN: Capping off a successful year
This year has been an exciting year of growth and innovation in ASUSU. First, I want to thank all of the officers for the tireless effort they have put into serving the student body. Their dedication, which often extended late into the night, is what made the successes of this year possible. I also want to thank the countless students who volunteered their time and energy to run each program and event. We have found that the secret to success in anything is having good people to plan, prepare and carry out the events, and that is exactly what we had this year.
In my first column this school year I talked about the importance of not only getting “through” college but getting “from” college. In every situation we find ourselves, there is always the choice to get through it or to get from it. As ASUSU officers, we saw student government as a great way to facilitate getting from college. With this in mind we set the goal to create more opportunities for more students to do just this. Each office has advanced this cause. One example is the Programming Office. This year, they implemented the Aggie event series and the Aggie cinema series in an effort to provide a more diverse range of events that more students would enjoy. To further expand opportunities in their office they developed a brand new marketing team, which has provided more opportunities and a more efficient way to get the word out about events.
As I stated earlier, this year has been full of innovation. When this year’s ASUSU Council members took office we took a long, hard look at everything that was done in the past. With each past decision made we had to make one of three choices: Keep it how it is, throw it out or keep it and make it better. Many of the things we looked at fell in the No. 3 category. Throughout the year we made many changes to the previous outdated ASUSU Constitution, updated Student Fee Policies, reworked the structure of officers, re-allocated budget money and revitalized ASUSU programs. No matter what the officers were told about what was possible and what was not, they kept fighting to put students’ interests first. They were never satisfied with what had been “good enough” in the past.
We are lucky to have a team of advisers and administrators as USU who know that if you want to have the best organization, you listen to the consumer and fulfill their needs. A perfect example of this came in a meeting discussing rebranding USU.
Provost Raymond Coward said, “When we are looking for professors to hire, we ask them how they feel about teaching undergrads vs. graduate education and research. If they ask how they can quickly get out of the classroom and focus on research, that person does not find a home at Utah State.”
This is the type of dedication that our administrators have to our success. Because of this, all the officers have been able to go to administration and let the student body’s voice be heard.
As this year ends and we transition to a new set of ASUSU officers, there is still a lot to be done and a lot of needs to be met. We have not been able to accomplish everything we wanted to do because we have spent as much time as possible training the new officers to take over right where we left off. Our goal is for them to accomplish more than we did and continue to develop the quality of students’ experience at this great institution.
– Erik Mikkelsen is the current ASUSU President. Comments on his column may be sent to statesmanoffice@aggiemail.usu.edu.