By Laura Kempton
Column by Student Senate Secretary

Student Senate has been keeping busy these past few weeks. We have hosted elections, had our Fall Retreat, set up our new office, and had our first student forum of the year!
Our first action of this new school year was to host elections for Judicial Board, Sophomore-Freshmen Leadership Council (SFLC), and Student Senate. We had a great turnout at elections. Thank you to everyone who used your voice to vote!
We want to congratulate those who were elected: Lauren Sutton to Judicial Board; Alaura McKemie, Serenity Sample, Heather Davis, and Samantha Reed to SFLC; and Mingyue Fan (Vivian) as International Representative, Victoria Goetz as Commuter Representative, and Alexis Dawson and Emily Black as Freshmen Representatives to Student Senate.
On the Saturday following elections we had our annual Fall Retreat. Our first activity of the day was to volunteer at the Multiple Sclerosis Walk on campus. We had a blast cheering on the walkers and bonding as Senators.
We then proceeded to brainstorm and set goals of things we would like to work on and accomplish for this year. We have a lot of exciting ideas and can’t wait to see them come to fruition!
One of those ideas is our new office located in the basement of Le Fer in Room 20, right by the Oakley Student Center (OSC). The office was officially opened on Monday, Sept. 19. We appreciated seeing all of you who stopped by to say hello.
We have our regular office hours on Monday’s and Thursday’s during snack from 9:00-9:45 p.m. Come check out our office if you haven’t already! We are there for you to hear your questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, ideas, etc on what we can do to better serve you.
We also had our first Commuter Forum of the year on Thursday, Sept. 22. It was a great success, and we received a great deal of positive feedback and comments from all who attended.
We meet every Tuesday at 12:15 p.m. in the Woods Student Center and as always our meetings are open to everyone. Feel free to email us at senate@smwc.edu, stop a Senator when you see them, or stop by our office on Monday’s and Thursday’s from 9:00-9:45 p.m.
We would love to hear from you!

Laura Kempton, Student Senate