Hello fellow OU students,

IT’S SUMMER! GLORIOUS! Sorry, got a bit excited there for a moment. All kidding aside, I do hope that you’re having a marvelous time relaxing in the sun (or, as the case may be, slaving away at jobs and internships, which is slightly less relaxing at times).

While we at Student Congress have done our fair share of hanging out in the sun, we’ve also been incredibly busy. Summer for us is mostly planning events, initiatives, etc. I’ll get right to the updates.

First of all, for a bit of overall Student Congress news: the legislature elected two new senior legislators, Cassie Hock and Kyler Johnson. If you’re not sure what a senior legislator does, it’s roughly the same thing as the speaker of the house — a leadership and mentorship position. The legislature has also been working on plans for the upcoming year. (I don’t want to steal their thunder, so to get more specifics, get in touch with a legislator and see what he/she has been up to!)

I don’t mean to sound repetitive when I say that I’ve been meeting with various deans and departments, but since this occupies a great deal of my time as president, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been working with members of the executive board to develop long-term initiatives for students. I know, I know, that’s a vague sentence, but I can’t give away more details now (although the words “swag campaign” keep coming to mind, among other things…). As you may remember from the campaign, one of my biggest initiatives was reforming the grading scale to make it more consistent and realistic across OU. I’m in the process of developing a grading scale; once that’s done, I’ll be ready to present it to various members of faculty, staff and administration.

As I mentioned last column, one of Madison’s biggest responsibilities as vice president is to work with the legislature to implement their initiatives and ideas. She’s been working on this during the past month, sitting down with each legislator and helping them on their projects. She has also been planning events for Student Congress, including our annual retreat where we draft a budget for the year.

Unfortunately, due to space, I can’t talk about each member of the executive board and all the numerous projects they’ve been working on, so I’ll just highlight a few.

Remember Rock 4 Rights, the annual event celebrating freedom that Student Congress puts on every year? We thought just having one event was getting a little old, so we decided to make it a week of events. Yes, an entire week of events celebrating liberty, free speech and other rights inherent to our existence as human beings that we hold dear. In short, it will be glorious. If you have any more questions about this, ask Andrew Laux, legislative affairs director.

For those of you who have been at OU for at least a year, you will remember the female student who was hit on the head outside Kresge last winter. A number of students then came to Student Congress and asked about campus safety and how to increase it. This year, we’ve been taking a hard look at a way to do so. Let’s be blunt for a moment: although OU has (relative to most universities) an extremely safe campus, even one instance of assault is unacceptable. Therefore, Sam Abbott, student service director, has been working on a way to increase safety. Again, I don’t want to give away his project, so ask him for details.

Student Congress has also been working on health initiatives, getting the funding board organized, setting up the Swag Campaign, working on diversity/multiculturalism events and a lot, lot more. I’d like to elaborate, but, as always, I’m most constricted in this column by the amount of space.

If you have any questions, shoot me an email ([email protected]) or a text (248-818-2875) or stop by the office in the basement of the OC. Until next time, keep an eye out on the Student Congress Facebook page; some updates are coming out soon that you won’t want to miss.