Students should get involved with SGA

The Student Government Association (SGA) decided what to do with over $3 million-the sum of all individual Student Activity Fees ($113 per student)-last year. SGA does this yearly through two bodies representing the graduate and undergraduate student populations.

The bodies are given advice from the Joint Finance Committee, but they are not required to follow it. This should be enough to convince students to care about the organization and become familiar with its activities.

If this does not convince you to flip through the Council Clippings section of the paper, consider what happened last week at the Undergraduate House of Representatives meeting: the undergraduates modified a bill which, if passed in its original form, would increase SGA adherence to its own policies on how to distribute the $3 million. The original bill would have given the Joint Finance Committee more authority; a 2/3 majority vote would have been required for a bill to pass if its recommended changes were not made.

Beyond this, SGA has responsibilities other than just allocating funds. The same organization is responsible for or funds things like Six Flags Night, Course Critique and Sting Break. Undergraduate and graduate representatives work to communicate student needs to the administration. SGA has many committees dedicated to issues such as academic affairs, parking and transportation and planning and development. In order to serve students effectively, SGA's members need to know what students want; students should care enough to let representatives or committee members know about changes they would like to see.

It is surprising, then, that most students I have come across do not know or care about the workings of SGA. I have hardly been approached about an issue dealing with the student government, except by those who belong to SGA or Technique staff members. This might be one of the consequences of being an engineering major-I do not interact much with non-engineering students except in a couple of student organizations and at the library, where I spend most of my time-but it would still be nice to know that the students I know care about what our representatives are spending their time doing.

It seems to me that a typical student at Tech knows more about how a computer works than how SGA functions. What these computer-lovers should realize, however, is that the amount of computing resources around the school or the number of LAN parties (for the unfortunate ones who missed it, OIT hosted one of these parties in the library last year for video gamers) that might be held depends at least partly on what kind of things are brought up in SGA committees.

From my viewpoint, it seems engineering students on the whole are hardly concerned with SGA. Instead, the majority of those I have met who really care about SGA belong to some other major. This is a shame, since a stronger presence of engineers in SGA would more closely resemble Tech's student makeup; it is strange that non-engineering students should control the student input in a school where a large focus is on engineering and computing.

In conclusion, more engineering students need to get involved and find out exactly what happens with their Student Activity Fee. They should find out the details of what happened last week and how it affects where their $113 per student is going.There should be more attempts to raise awareness about SGA and how it affects all students. The bottom line is that these students need to be more concerned about where their money is going and what their representatives know about them.

Simply being an engineering or CS major is no excuse. Being aware that SGA actually exists for a purpose and knowing that purpose is just the first step-maybe one day more engineering students will take active roles in SGA, whether in committees or in leadership positions.

Who knows-if I'm lucky enough, a brave fellow engineer might take charge and serve a term as president before I graduate.