Student Government Association presidential candidate Meghan Hickok and vice presidential candidate Kristin Callahan are running to give students a voice on campus.
“We just really want to make the students feel like they are important to us, they are important to Belmont and their voices are being heard,” said Callahan. “So at the end of the day, we want to run for the students.”
The duo has been involved in SGA for two years now and have been responsible for events like Pancakes and Problems, where students have the opportunity to get free pancakes and discuss issues they see around campus.
If Hickok and Callahan are elected, they hope to implement three major changes — improving parking, spreading awareness about resources available to students and creating more social spaces on campus.
“We would love to improve parking on campus, because that’s a main thing that people have complained about,” said Hickok.
This would include adding spot detectors to all garages, putting blind spot mirrors in the garages in both the Janet Ayers Academic Center and McWhorter Hall and adding signs that encourage drivers to be more cautious in the garages.
Highlighting the resources available to students such as Title IX, counseling services and nutrition services is another goal for the candidates, said Hickok.
“I think that it’s super important to know how to use them and how you can actually implement them in your student life. And so I just think raising awareness about using those resources is very important.”
Their final goal is to create more spaces geared toward cultivating a social environment for students.
“Belmont has a lot of academic spaces, we have a lot of study spaces but we really don’t have chill spaces,” said Callahan.
In addition to adding more relaxed spaces, Hickok and Callahan also want to revamp the academic spaces already on campus. They plan to add more tables to the JAAC lobby, increase usage of private study rooms and update the study areas in Wright and Maddox halls.
“I think our biggest goal, as I said earlier, is just continuing to build that bridge between students and administration. Our little slogan is ‘a vote for us is a vote for your voice,’” said Hickok.
“We want to be sure that we are being extremely, extremely diligent about hearing students out and being able to actually implement the changes that they want to see.”
Voting for SGA president and vice president will be open on BruinLink from Feb. 6-8.
The Vision will be holding an informal debate with the presidential and vice presidential candidates on Monday. Students can submit questions for the debate to belmontvisionnews@gmail.com.
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This article written by Abigail Bowen. Photo courtesy of the Hickok/Callahan campaign.