Blog Post #9 : First Draft

I was involved with Student Government Association in high school and it helped me to find other clubs and hobbies such as interact club and cross country that have helped me to make friends all over campus and find what interests me. I would love to dive into Student Senate and really find out how big of an impact this community can have on a student. Student Senate specifically has so many students involved and it makes me curious as to how it has had an effect on its members, how has it shaped their individual college experience thus far? Once you graduate college and have the degree you look back on what it was like to attend Florida State and if you truly made the most of its resources and experiences. Student Government in high school helped me to get the most of my high school experience and I think it could really help me to get the most of college. How can the Florida State Student Senate help to shape a student’s individual college experience?

The Student Senate at Florida State is composed of eighty members whom represent FSU’s seventeen divisions of majors. If you go to the FSU SGA web page you will see this information along with a description about the Legislative branch as a whole at FSU. The eighty-member senate is broken up by first and second years considered “undergraduate studies” and third and fourth year students are grouped and classified by their majors. “Senators are elected in the fall and spring about five weeks after classes begin. To run for the Senate, you must file your candidacy application with the Supervisor of Elections office by the advertised deadline, usually four weeks after classes begin.” (SGA.FSU) This is a brief description of how a candidate would run to be a Student Senator at FSU. This is important to the overall Student Senate process because one must understand what the Student Senate is at FSU and how to get involved before deciding whether or not they too would want to get involved. “Campus political parties usually help their candidate’s complete candidacy applications and submit them for their candidates. Most parties interview students to choose those whose campaigns the parties will support.” This is a crucial component of getting involved/elected into the Student Senate because a student can choose to run independently or with an on-campus, student run political party, these parties are what help students along the process of getting into the Senate.

The current Senate is the sixty-ninth Student Senate at FSU and the elections currently taking place are for the seventieth Student Senate, ran by students. The overall goal of the Student Senate is to advocate for the FSU student body for events, clubs, and change on campus. This is very powerful because this student run organization, gets to invite change and make change happen around campus that students what to see. This could be a small action like a club wanting money from SGA for shirts, in which senate would vote yes or no to fund the shirts and for how much they would cost. To much larger change such as implementing gender neutral bathrooms, this is a huge change for any public community, especially a university to such change. The Student Senate at FSU is supposed to be a community where students can take action, be leaders, and voice their opinions where they know they will be heard and taken into consideration.