Jessica Hernandez
Student Body President Jess Errico is a fifth-year studying mechanical and aerospace engineering.
After winning the Student Body President runoff election against Alberto Quiroga and Zach Lewis, the Student Body President-elect Jess Errico, who ran alongside Student Body Vice President-elect Meredith Spence Beaulieu, sat down with Technician to discuss their campaign and plans in office.
What was the biggest strength of your campaign?
We really emphasized that our campaign platform was built in the same way we would like for our office to be run and our administration to be run. We reached out to different members of the community around campus that we don’t necessarily identify with to help get a more diverse, much fuller picture of NC State. During campaigning, you can only have 15 people on your team, so clearly that’s not going to encompass every community on campus. We did reach out to multiple different communities to kind of get an idea of what real issues are rather than what we think issues are facing that group or that community. I think that was the strength of our campaign is that that showed through and that that intention of it’s easy to say that you are going to go in the community, and you’re going to go out a make sure you’re listening to students, but we were able to say we’ve done it already. That’s how we built our platform. We know our platform. The issues in our platform are real, so we’re also going to do it in our office.
What was the hardest part of the campaign?
I think one of the hardest parts of the campaign was keeping that positive spin on everything. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of talking about why the other candidates aren’t going to be good for it or pointing out their faults. It’s one thing to do that with a platform and ask questions around the platform, but in terms of staying on topic and sending off a positive message of your campaign and your strengths as a pair and your strengths as a team, that’s tough. I think that’s a daily challenge in campaigning, but it’s one that, I think, we handled well, and we had the benefit of a strong team to help us stay on the message. Also coordinating such a large-scale thing in terms of teamwork, it’s tough. It presents a good challenge. I think it’s good prep work for office.
What is the first thing that you’re excited to get started on as president?
I am super excited to put together our cabinet. I’m excited to get the application together, get that out and get it advertised across campus rather than just within Student Government. I’m excited to get our team together since I know a lot of the capabilities of an administration come from the strengths of the team that they put together. I’m super excited to get started on getting that team together and making sure that it’s representative of the student body and more importantly, that it’s a team that is going to be willing to listen to students and is going to work hard so that together we can accomplish the things that we said we would accomplish. There’s a lot of aspects to the campaign that I think are going to be more long-term pieces, like Beyond the Box and gender-inclusive housing, where we’re going to need to be interfacing with the Association of Student Governments to accomplish. I’m looking forward to getting started on those because I know those are going to be more long-term battles, so getting started on those right away will be good. A couple smaller scale things in terms of can we be advocating for the first-year live-on requirement with exceptions to that, and while we work on gender-inclusive housing as a whole, can we get exceptions for students who don’t feel safe living in a designated housing situation?
How do you plan on understanding and receiving the student body when you’re putting things in place?
Our general plan is to be present at community events. That’s a big piece of it, to just be present and be available. Also, knowing we are not going to be able to be at every general body meeting for every student group, nor are we going to be able to interact with every club at every moment they’re meeting. I think one strength of Meredith and I, and one thing that we plan on doing, is saying, ‘We want to be present, we want to be going to these things as much as possible,’ but at the same time knowing that if a specific issue is coming up or if administration is having a certain conversation that would affect any population more than any other then making sure that they’re a part of the conversation and bringing them into the room to be a part of that conversation rather than just defaulting the speech on their behalf. That’s one way we plan on staying accountable to students is when we can’t be at every club meeting, at least being sure that as conversations are being had around campus that the people being affected are always part of it.