Meets SGA's new leaders: A Q/A with Christian Guillory and Luis Ramirez
The Â鶹ÊÓƵ Student Government Association represents the voice of students, facilitates new and improved student services and programs, and serves an important role in student judicial proceedings. In this Q&A, Christian Guillory, SGA president, and Luiz Ramirez, SGA vice president, share what SGA learned over the past year, major projects for the academic year and more.
Q: What is your major and classification?
Christian (SGA president): I'm a senior and I'm actually a double major –– finance and accounting.
Luis (SGA Vice president): I am a junior majoring in mechanical engineering.
Q: What brought you to Â鶹ÊÓƵ?
Christian (SGA president): I always knew I wanted to go here. I grew up in the Beaumont/Orange area and Â鶹ÊÓƵ has always been close to home.
Luis (SGA Vice president): My story is pretty similar. Up and until May of my senior year, I was going to another university, but I got a scholarship at Â鶹ÊÓƵ and that was pretty nice. I ended up getting a job nearby so that also sealed the deal.
Q: As the new SGA president and vice president, how would you describe your leadership style?
Christian (SGA president): I think to describe me and Luis in a couple of words –– Luis' personality is a little bit more of like a fresh can of soda with a memento candy thrown into it.The after effect of that is Luis' personality. He's very excited about everything. I think I'm a little more of like a flat soda –– very calm and settled in everything that I do. I also have to be the one to calm Luis down because when he's passionate about something, he takes off like a rocket.
Luis (SGA Vice president): I just love shoulder-to-shoulder interaction and being with people is really fun to me. This past summer, I worked at a summer camp and we get what are called character quality words that best describe us. The word that I received was "dynamic." So, I think anything that really just makes people excited about something is where I want to be.
Q: What are some of SGA’s biggest initiatives within the past year that will continue to make an impact on the organization moving forward?
Christian (SGA president): Tiffany and David did a lot and I think they implemented 17 resolutions, which is a lot, so they did a really good job. We have some big shoes to fill –– we'll see if we fill them. We have a different approach on how we want to do things. Tiffany and David looked at safety and campus life … they were strong on safety and they did some great things. We're looking more at campus engagement because we want to see people out and about involved in whatever. We really want to pull those commuter students out of their houses and onto the campus. So, we're going to try to put on our events, work with Cardinal Activities Board and everybody else to get some things done.
Luis (SGA Vice president): Me and Christian have really been focusing on advocating for student engagement and getting people involved who wouldn’t necessarily have a voice. We want to advocate and use our voices on their behalf. I think that maybe what some would describe as introverted people, or people who wouldn’t necessarily take that first step themselves –– we’re trying to find ways to reach them. We want to take that first step for them, in a way and we're really excited about that.
Q: What are some new things that you would like to see implemented on campus?
Luis (SGA Vice president): We cannot stop talking to President Taylor about scooters. We saw him on his recent video riding around campus on his scooter and we would love to have that implemented on campus for students.
Christian (SGA president): We’re going to be researching other universities that currently have scooters, what their problems are with them and how they solved them. We’ll start taking a look at that towards December to hopefully be implemented for next year.
Q: How does SGA plan to get students within our campus community involved?
Christian (SGA president): We have to do about 10 office hours a week and what we plan on doing with about half of them is we're going to make an interest form and walk around campus and find students. We're going to use those interest forms to get students interests, hobbies and what they think they would like to get involved in.
Luis (SGA Vice president): It’s obvious that Â鶹ÊÓƵ attracts more commuter students especially in the Southeast Texas area. That interest form is going to help immensely now that we already know where the commuter students are. I live on campus now, but last year, me and Luis were both commuter students, so we know the fields of being commuters. We're going to use those forms to find the clubs that we think would best fit them. If they need the help, if they need us to come to the meetings with them, we will. But yes, our office is going to be open for anything. If any student needs to come in and talk about whatever, we got them.
Q: What are some of SGA’s major projects for the 2022-2023 year?
Christian (SGA president): Cardinal Engagement hour is in place now. Every Tuesday and Thursday from 12:45 – 1:45 p.m. there will be no classes scheduled during this time (with the exception of labs). We think that this will be immensely helpful for our commuter students who sometime aren’t able to attend events during that time because they are in class.
Luis (SGA Vice president): President Taylor always says that if a student goes to just one thing –– sporting event, game, etc. –– they are more likely to succeed and Cardinal Engagement hour is a really awesome way for us to do that.
Christian (SGA president): Looking back at how many students, faculty and staff we’ve lost recently, what we wanted to do for sure is have a mural somewhere on campus where we wrote the names of those faculty staff students that passed away while they were at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. So that was an option We're also considering, for the fallen students especially, taking a lock and putting their name on it and attaching it to the overpass leading to the Montagne Center. We especially liked that idea a lot for the fallen students because they didn't make it to graduation and so this was their like in-between.
Luis (SGA Vice president): We'd also like to implement some traditions here, especially with the centennial coming up, but of course that will take time. We also really want to implement more cultural events for students. We’d love to partner with student organizations or maybe even the Brooks-Shivers Dining Hall for a cultural tasting event.
Q: What are you looking forward to this fall semester?
Christian (SGA president): I'm looking forward to the freshmen coming on campus. We have a couple of events for SGA starting during the Week of Welcome and the following week. We’re going to try our best to retain their “freshman high” while they're at Â鶹ÊÓƵ and plug them in early. So that's, that's what I'm looking forward to.
Luis (SGA Vice president): I think personally, new semesters are really cool. Like, you get to start new your classes and it's all in your hands. There's a lot of room for doing really well, which is cool, and meeting new people is something I love to do. Friendships that can be forged this semester, this school year or even these next two years –– that's exciting. That's what I'm looking forward to.