Starting Off the Fall Semester

Save the Dates

McGeorge Women’s Caucus Live and Silent Auction – September 26th

McGeorge Lambda Sixth Annual Fall Spectacular and Silent Auction – October 18th

Building a McGeorge Community

One of the things I pledged to work on as SBA President was building a McGeorge community where second years, third years, and fourth years had more opportunities to meet with the incoming class to bring them into the McGeorge family.

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SBA Incoming Students Welcome Mixer

To do this, the SBA Board took on a handful of initiatives and events over the summer.  Those initiatives include things such as the Student Leaders program, direct involvement by myself and our Second Year Evening Representative Megan Donaghey with the Orientation Committee, the first SBA Incoming Students Welcome Mixer, and a lot of collaborative work between the SBA Board team and the McGeorge Administration.

I’d like to highlight one initiative that I think symbolizes what we as a student body working together can accomplish.  To date the Student Leaders program has initiated 120 connections (64 incoming students with 56 upper division students).  I would take up too much of this blog post to identify every single person that needs to be thanked to have made that happen, but it has been a huge team effort.  I do want to personally thank Jess Melgar, Drew Weir, and Monika Troike for their assistance as part of the Student Leader Coordination team as they were instrumental in helping pair up the initial 40 incoming students with upper division students during the first week of school.

Changes to the SBA Blog, SBA Bylaws, and Policies

I am genuinely blessed with a dedicated SBA Board who are taking charge of different parts of the SBA Blog to make it a repository for everything SBA related.  Below are examples of new changes that have come for this year:

  • The SBA Budget will be posted in real time by the SBA Treasurer Neil Cacali so that students know exactly where all SBA funds go literally as the SBA Treasurer processes the paperwork.  No need to ask SBA where student money is going, we are proactively publishing that information.
  • 48 hours before the SBA meets, the Agenda for our meetings will be posted on the SBA Blog and the SBA Secretary Kate Casey will be posting the minutes following those meetings on the front page.
  • The top menu bar has now been reformatted to organize more information to be persistently on the front page.
  • Major events on campus will be blogged about by SBA Board Members (see the most recent post by 3rd Year Evening Representative Stephen Guichard on Orientation Week).
  • American Bar Association events and information will be posted by the ABA Representative Mirwais Haider for students to stay up to date on ABA matters.

As for our internal policies and bylaws, currently the SBA Board have proposed the following proposed changes to our bylaws.  Under the rules, students are to submit comments to SBA Board members regarding their thoughts on the bylaw changes triggering a process where we respond to those comments.  While the rules only require these proposals to be available for public comment for one week, the SBA Board and I agreed to hold them open until the first year class elect their day and evening representatives so that they may have their input before concluding the amendment process.

Once we have a full SBA Board, we will begin to discuss our SBA Election Code, which I believe is in need of reform to make the elections more accessible to as many students interested in competing for a leadership position within the SBA Board.

Next Steps for the Fall

Thanks to the hard work of our SBA Vice Presidents Lexi Howard and Shoeb Mohammed, on August 27th the SBA ratified our SBA Committee Chairs to expand our capacity to improve student life.  The following individuals have been named Chairs of SBA Committees and I want to thank them for volunteering their time and energy:

Elections Committee

Co-Chairs
Sean Baird
Jennifer Trotter

Activities and Sports Committee

Chair
Connor Worden

Barristers Ball Committee

Chair
Jaclyn Zdanowski

Diversity Committee

Co-Chairs
Courtney Dowell
Riha Pathak

Sustainability/Garden Committee

Co-Chairs
Amelia Hicks
Bruce Pence

Wellness Committee

Chair
Caroline Soto

Career Development Committee

Co-Chairs
Amanda Kelly
Alexander Khan

Each of these SBA Committees will be busy at work and soon will have their own space on the SBA Blog.  A major change that the SBA Board has agreed to in our June meeting is to have SBA Board members more involved in working with SBA Committees.  That way, the SBA Board and its Committees are more in synch and collaborative in their work.

 

About Ernesto Falcon

Ernesto Falcon is the Student Bar Association President for the 2014-2015 term. His goals are to help build a McGeorge student community and to maximize the professional opportunities for students.
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