Jackie Gonzalez, a fourth-year studying political science, is currently serving as student body president during the 97th session of Student Government. Technician sat down with her to talk about her presidency thus far.

What made you run for president, and what drove you to win?

I think one of the things I felt as a woman of color and a person of color on campus, with the national climate, I felt like students like me were becoming more and more uncomfortable and less safe on campus. I wanted to make sure that I had someone representing them, and I thought who else could do that better than me.

The only requirement for me running personally, was I needed to have another woman of color running by my side because I knew that women of color were capable and I wanted to show that women of color can succeed, and yes a woman of color can be the student body president of the largest institution in North Carolina. The second part, which is not as glamorous, was that there had been a lot of internal struggle in Student Government and I wanted to mend that between the branches, and create communication between them.

What is your platform as student body president? 

Mia, I and our team put together a huge document where we placed our ideas onto, and we asked ourselves, ‘what can we accomplish, what are things that are going to outlive our serving terms and what are things that we see as problems?’ Some of the issues we scrapped and some we kept, molding our platform. Internal communication was one of our main topics we ran off of. Sustainability was also something Mia and I were very passionate about, wanting to set up a sustainability department which Senate enacted last year to uplift other sustainability organizations to be on the same page.

Sexual assault education was also another big one, we wanted to make sure students were feeling comfortable on campus and know there [are] resources in order to have that safe state of mind. We wanted to do what we could on the topic, knowing that there is no one solution for figuring out the numbers. We overall want to keep communication flowing across campus, and with a sexual assault town hall coming up, we are continuously doing so.

What is your main goal to accomplish as president?

I want to leave a legacy for people like me to feel empowered and succeed, and that was one of the things that I was really passionate about running for student body president and Senate. I wanted students to know that you can empower yourself and you do not need to rely on Student Government or campus entities to do that change for you. 

How is that goal going?

I think one of the things that I am working on right now is trying to document as much as I can and send it out over the Listserv, and once our website is up and running I will put all the information up, trying to engage student leaders to come to these meetings and represent themselves. I am one person and I have a lot of questions, but I might miss questions that are necessary, so that’s one step I am trying to do, document everything. The second step of that is trying to figure out the proper way to distribute that information.

How do you plan on reflecting the wants and the needs of the student body?

I receive many emails with students concerned about a majority of things, from when is fall break … to questions about athletics. One example is transportation in the College of Textiles; the bus does not stop there anymore. The benefit of having great people in the executive branch, is that I feel comfortable enough to utilize them as resources that might have more information, or I give out points of reference, just overall distributing those resources. I try to be as receptive as I can on the spot, but I want to let the students know that there are other campus resources that can be used.

What are some of your future plans and what can the student body expect?

One of the biggest goals I have is to make sure that I am doing plans that will outlive me. A lot of times student body presidents and presidents in general will try to do as much as they can during their terms, but a lot of what I am doing is substantial. Longer than my term, plans that will reflect the University and look at what areas we can improve on. For example, the Graduate Student Department is new and we established that working with [the Graduate Student Association] and my graduate student chair, looking at what we could improve on reaching out to grad students.

I am also doing a transportation task force, which I will write an executive order for to appoint people to it. The task force will be a case study of ‘what do students think about transportation, what are the same questions we get ever year and as Student Government, what can we do about it?’ The first step in doing that is research and talking to a lot of students and using resources. I tell my transportation task force and graduate student chairs that this issue might outlive them and they might not get to see their fruits of their labor, but what they are doing will help incoming students and future Student Governments.