Meet your senator: College of Engineering
Utah State University Student Association engineering senator Olivia Binks was more than 15 minutes late for her senator profile interview.
When she arrived, talking faster than an episode of “Gilmore Girls,” she apologized and explained she had gotten caught up helping another student with a problem. Then she sat down with a large but genuine smile.
Binks is from South Jordan, Utah. She enjoys being outside, hiking in the mountains and riding her bike — but don’t call her a cyclist because she says she is nowhere near being good enough to ever call herself one. She also enjoys going out to Tandoori Oven and listening to “The Shins.”
More importantly though, she’s majoring in environmental engineering and is halfway through her senior year. She is getting ready to graduate in May, something she’s been looking forward to for a long time.
“I’m ready to move on,” Binks said. “I’m ready to do something else with my life.”
She may not know what that something else is quite yet, but the fact she doesn’t have her life planned out after graduation is something that terrifies her in the best way possible. The only thing she does know is she wants to take some time to see what else the world has to offer beyond Utah.
“I want to just go anywhere,” she said. “I like Utah and I feel like one day I’ll end up in Salt Lake eventually, but I’d like to go somewhere else and see the world.”
In many ways, Olivia is a lot like a typical college senior getting ready to graduate. What makes her different though, is unlike most students, she’s the current elected senator for the college of engineering. Being the senator of a college wasn’t something she had always planned on doing, but with every year that passed, her mind began to change.
“It was the natural next step,” Binks said. “I was really involved in clubs for the past three years and I liked being involved in college. I was part of the society of women in engineering and was the VP of that. I was an ambassador and I was in housing and so the next thing that I hadn’t done yet was student government, so I felt like everything I had been doing had been building up to this. I felt like I was in a good place to help students.”
Looking back at the time of her campaign, Olivia is still surprised that she won the senator position because she didn’t think she had a good shot in the beginning.
“I didn’t have a good strategy,” she said. “But my campaign was to talk to individual students as much as I could. I had friends who helped me with the design work on my posters, which I think helped. I couldn’t have done it without them and I’m really grateful. When it came down to it though, I just talked to students and asked what their concerns were and then I wrote my platform off of that.”
In the end, her campaign was more effective than she thought. Being senator of her college is something she’s proud of and she sees this as an opportunity to allow women to shine in a major that is highly populated by men.
“Gender stereotypes are definitely real,” Binks said. “Most of them at this time are sub-conscious though. I’ve never experienced blatant sexism. The underlining stigmas are there and women have to overcome that.”
It may be hard at times to be the minority in such a competitive program, but Binks doesn’t see it as something that has slowed her down or hindered her from succeeding.
“We have a good support system,” she said. “Good professors, the society of women in engineering, other peers in same situation; it’s all there. Being a woman in this program hasn’t hindered me and more than anything, it’s empowered me to make myself better.”
With her term coming to an end early next year, Binks is excited to meet whoever will take her place and she is hopeful the time she spent as a senator will have made an impact on those around her, like it has for her personally.
Before she officially ends her run as Senator, Binks hopes to reach out to as many students in her college as possible and provide them with more opportunities than they’ve had in the past. At the very least, she said, she hopes to help students become away of the resources they have.
“I think a lot of students don’t know who they can talk to about issues they are concerned with or suggestions they have,” she said, “and I want them to know that members of the USUSA student government sincerely care and will do their best to help them make changes where they want to.”