Hey Bears! My name is Tamia Schiele, and I am the 2024-2025 Student Body President of Missouri State. In this role, I am President of the Student Government Association (SGA). Some of my daily tasks include meeting with campus Administrations, reviewing proposals, leading meetings, and meeting with students. I work alongside an amazing group of people we call the “SGA Leadership Team.” This team include Collin Chastain, Sam Wang and Emma Vytlacil.
Collin Chastain is the 2024-2025 Student Body Vice President, and also serves as the SGA Vice President. In this role Collin is the head of SGA’s Legislative branch where he leads our weekly Senate meetings, which are held at 5:30pm in PSU 313. These meetings are open to any Missouri State Student, so feel free to stop by! Sam Wang is SGA’s Chief of Staff, and during the campaigning season served as Collin and I’s Campaign manager. Sam works to plan fun events for our members and ensure our Cabinet members are organized.
Emma Vytlacil is the 2024-2025 Senior Class President. Emma ran her own campaign on the theme of Brighter Horizons in the Spring of 2024. The goal of this platform is to promote resources for seniors across campus and emphasize the importance of the Senior Class President by having a strong relationship with the senior class. This year she hopes to intentionally engage with the senior class through outreach tactics such as tabling, surveying, and newsletters. This way seniors can be involved in-person and digitally. Her day-to-day tasks consist of working with the Alumni Association to help execute her presidential initiatives while preparing the senior-class gift, Winter Grad Finale/Grad Bash, and other senior-class events.
Forward with Purpose: Your Voice, Our Vision
Now we will be talking about the platform that Sam, Collin and I collaboratively created. The Forward with Purpose campaign has three central themes: Student Advocacy, Intentional Engagement and Internal Reform.
Student Advocacy
For student advocacy, we will ensure that our SGA is representative of student experiences and opinions here at MSU. We want students to feel that SGA is a viable way to have their concerns heard and met. Below are some ideas of how we will make this happen.
- Utilize student petitioning rights
- Create a form for students to report various issues
- Be transparent about Student Government spending
- Register with a national interpersonal violence prevention organization
- Give out free blue books and scantrons during midterm and finals week
- Give out monthly student vouchers for the Union Club
- Remind students about parking lot closures
Intentional Engagement
Under intentional engagement, we will be sure to stay connected to the students at Missouri State. We also want to maintain and develop our relationships with student organizations on campus. Here is how we plan to stay engaged with students.
- Educate students about the Student Initiative and Wyrick funds
- Hold consistent meetings with student organizations
- Redesign the Student Government Association website
- Increase collaboration with the Office of Student Engagement
- Incorporate culturally competent foods in the Bear Pantry
- Develop a student tuition breakdown
Internal Reform
Within internal reform we want improve how SGA works internally to make sure we are serving the student body as best as we can. Below are some ways we plan to enhance our internal practice.
- Register as an official student government
- Prioritize legislation over event planning
- Improve Parliamentary Procedure training
- Provide quarterly budget updates for the student body
- Utilize open forums to better explain projects
- Create a guide for the Elections Code
Together Tamia, Emma, Collin and Sam want to take SGA and the MSU student body Forward with Purpose to Brighter Horizons! Thanks for reading along and feel free to reach out to me at StudentBodyPresident@missouristate.edu or feel free to drop by my office in PSU 313. Thank you and GO BEARS!