I recently spoke with The Shield about being unjustly disqualified from running for the position of the SGA President. While the article written touches upon the story somewhat, it leaves a decent amount of detail out that is important. However, for the sake of simplicity and time, I’ll set that story aside and talk more about this: the SGA at USI is a cliquey waste of time.

I attended SGA’s general meetings as a student not in an elected position in both the Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 semesters. The vast majority of the time I sat in those meetings, I felt as if I was unwelcome and when I spoke it felt like people wondered why I was even there or that they wanted me to leave. It was also difficult to figure out when and where these meetings took place even though they’re supposed to always be open to the public. This school year was even worse on that front since the meetings were primarily on Zoom and the SGA never shared the links for students to attend.

From both my own perspective and what I’ve heard from many other students, SGA is, simply put, a joke. They don’t care about what students really want or what students are saying. They don’t try and do their jobs to the best of their ability (a common trait of people on our campus). And they are a clique and only want the certain people they want to be in the group. I was very disappointed when I realized this and this was one of the primary reasons why I wanted to run for the President position. Since I was unjustly barred from even running for the President position and there is no real opportunity to change the group’s mindset, I felt I might as well publicize the majority of the student body’s feelings toward SGA. Maybe one day they’ll wake up… or maybe not.