After a recent turn of events, junior political science major Renee Waller and sophomore political science major Seth Gladysz are now running for Student Government Association president and vice president unopposed this election cycle. Waller served as Hart Hall’s SGA senator during the 2017-18 school year, and Gladysz is currently Sigma Hall’s senator.
Without competition, Waller and Gladysz will still campaign to reach out to students, get feedback and communicate their vision for the next year. The most important part for their near-guaranteed administration, Waller says, is to serve students. That, and Waller and Gladysz must also secure 10 percent of the student body’s vote to be elected.
“So there’s an important aspect in there too, that we don’t want this to be something that we [get students to say], ‘Oh, we’ll click their name,’ and you know, get in office,” Waller said. “We want to earn votes. We want to earn trust, because we’re not going to be successful, or we’re going to be less successful in our roles if we don’t have the authority and backing of the people that we’re serving.”
PLATFORM OF PURSUING PASSIONS
Waller and Gladysz plan to earn these votes with a three-point platform centered on their slogan, “Pursue Your Passion.” The three points they hope to enact are “partner, proactive and participate.”
The partner section of their campaign focuses on connecting student groups and organizations to pursue their goals together. The proactive section centers on training SGA senators to seek Biola students with ideas, come alongside them and to help them pursue their goals, instead of solely requiring students to come to senators or SGA with ideas.
“We think we can proactively train our administration and that would really give students opportunities in ways that they had never felt before,” Gladysz said. “As a senator currently, I have found that there are students that have these amazing ideas, but getting them off the ground is really hard, especially for freshmen.”
Participate, the final section of their platform, focuses on freeing up students to participate on campus. Waller and Gladysz plan to create an interconnected events calendar that is both online and in the SGA office, so students have the opportunity to be involved.
EQUIPPED FOR TASK
The two say they feel equipped for and called to the task of serving the Biola student body. They have both served as first-year interns to the SGA president, Waller under Jessica Snow in 2016-17 and Gladysz last school year under Gregory Ambrose. Through those experiences, they say they first learned what works and what does not work in student government. Both have been involved in the Student Missionary Union and clubs on campus. Gladysz, a native of Canada, is also a global student and says he feels excited to represent them.
Voting will take place on Feb. 11 and 12 online and at voting booths across campus, and the results will be announced on Feb. 12 at 10 p.m.
“We’d just be really humbled by the opportunity to be able to serve the students, and we’ve both been so blessed here at Biola [in] our experience with professors and administration and our peers,” Waller said. “So anyway that we can give back, we want to serve the way that Christ did and we don’t want student government to be perceived as something above other people or out of reach. It’s something that hopefully should always be a position where we’re humbling ourselves, and that’s all we ask from students is the opportunity to serve them.”
