Meet Your New Texas A&M Student Senators

The democratic process is used widely throughout America today and in universities students are given their first sincere knowledge of how the democratic process is supposed to work.

However, across American universities students sadly learn the anesthetized, lethargic attitude of government as well. They either don’t know or don’t want to take the time to learn about it. It is for this reason that student body president John Claybrook wrote a letter to The Battalion expressing how the student senate is not fulfilling its duties in representing the student body. In his article Claybrook called for a change in the student senate asking people to vote for candidates based on who would represent the students best.

The Texas A&M student body recently selected students that will serve them as a part of the Student Government Association (SGA) and Dwayne Giles and Holly Scott were elected as student senators to the Texas A&M SGA. Giles and Scott gladly expressed how they and their colleagues will help to make the student senate into what the students expect this next year.

Holly Scott was elected senator for the College of Liberal Arts and Dwayne Giles was elected senator for the College of Engineering and they have been picked to represent students at Texas A&M.

Giles and Scott are both minorities in different senses as Giles is an African-American male and Scott is a white female and these things come with their own challenges in today’s society. Dwayne said it will both be helpful and a struggle to deal with.

“It kind of works both ways,” Giles said. “It’s an advantage because there are not many minorities that are visible when it comes to campus leadership. I think more minorities will go out for leadership positions seeing people like Chris Powell (newly-elected African-American yell leader) obtain positions like these. However, depending on where someone might have come from – maybe a small town - they might not have interacted with a minorty until now. That could possibly work to my disadvantage.”

Giles mentioned that until this past year, like the majority of students on campus, he was not aware of how student government worked or even what the process was. This lack of experience shows someone who hasn’t been in the system, someone who has not had a chance to be “politicized” in what he does and will truly do things for the students.

On the other hand experience is also important, which Scott was proud to show she has very much of, which is a possible reason that she is so comfortable as a leader on campus. She has served on SGA seemingly since the beginning of her time at A&M (I personally believe experience tremendously helps break bariers in government) and said it is all about a person’s mind and not necessarily what they look like.

“I’ve never been one to say gender plays a role in helping or hurting one’s ability to do a job,” Scott said. “I prefer to think that being able to stand up and make well-structured arguments with the students’ concerns in mind is a more important attribute than anything else.”

From an experience that rings in Aggies’ minds – over gun control in which students were possibly misrepresented – Aggies should be cautious about who is in office, but if Giles and Scott are any indication of how the students will be represented in the near future, we need not worry one bit. Both senator-elects talked about plans that will be and have already taken place on improving relations and letting the students’ voices be heard.

“The entire reason I’m involved in SGA is to serve the students,” Scott said. “Over the next year, I’m hoping to speak to a number of students and really get their concerns understood and to work to make their time at Texas A&M a little bit better if I can. I intend to always work to keep students involved in SGA and to let them know how their student government is working to improve their time at Texas A&M. I can’t express this enough.”

Giles talked about things that are already in the works.

“I’ve already kind of seen it,” Giles said. “We’ve started to actually post on some of the class pages and asked, ‘what do y’all want?’ and even asking questions of how to improve negative experiences.”

All in all, Giles and Scott have presented themselves as student representatives in a graceful and positive way. I have all the faith in them and as I mentioned before, if every member of the senate goes into the upcoming year with the same mindset as these two then it will be more than successful.

To Giles and Scott: Thank you and Congratulations.

God bless and Gig ‘em! ’13