David Long
sophomore
criminal justice
Why are you running for the position?
Well, this is my second year, if I get elected, that I’ll be on SGA executive board. This year I was the Vice President of Student Engagement and I had a lot of fun, I got a lot done, but I’ve found this new passion for videography, pictures and the digital graphics field of communications. That’s something that’s sparked a fire in my life, and I feel like having that executive board position in SGA will allow me to use my strengths and assets to better the organization as we continue to get stronger and grow.
What are your goals if you’re elected to VP of Marketing and Communications?
I would say my No. 1 goal is to completely [improve communication] between SGA, our general assembly, our executive board and the university and the student body. I feel like a lot of kids don’t generally know what we do as SGA. They just know it’s SGA, they have money and they do stuff with that money. As vice president of Marketing and Communications, I want to digitize everything we do. If that means making a weekly newsletter or something like that, I just want the university to be more aware of what we do. More informed and all on the same page so things are transparent and not like, ‘Oh, well what do guys do?’ So I would say my goal is to combat that uncertainty of what it is SGA does.
What have you accomplished during your time on campus/SGA?
We did Unity Week — we gave away about $125 in gift cards just playing games and stuff during Homecoming week. We are in the process of our Student Spotlight series [which had its first event on Tuesday]. We took a group down to Lead 365, which was a leadership experience set up through the student engagement aspect of SGA. There’s another group that’s going to go down to Hawaii at the end of this year, the Lead X group. So those are just different leadership opportunities that are on an annual basis and are kind of geared through that aspect of student engagement.
[Lead X] is a group primarily for upperclassman students and it’s kind of just that last “hoorah” in the leadership development process that you go through here at Gannon and through the Office of Student Engagement and Campus Involvement. Basically, Ang [Coustillac] and Brian [Nichols] take a group of students on a nearly two-week trip to Hawaii, but prior to that you spend the whole year meeting once a week either as a full group, one-on-ones, duos and triads, just meeting and getting to know each other and getting to know more about yourself and working toward that next stage of leadership development of “What’s my next stage in life? Where am I? Where am I going?” Finding that fission and your mission and your “Why.”
Why should students vote for you?
I’d like students to vote for me simply because through my actions that I’ve already done, through my campus involvement, I’m pretty heavily involved on campus. I’m a tour guide, I’m in Greek life, different clubs and organizations and I’d like to believe that my status on campus and my actions speak for themselves. So I would just ask kids to really think about me, think about my character and the interactions they’ve had with me and determine if that’s sufficient enough for me to be in this position.
Why do you think there aren’t many people running for the SGA board this year?
Again, I think it comes back to people just generally knowing what’s going on and being aware and informed of what’s going on. A lot of kids also just don’t know what they want to do in life and stepping into these leadership roles can sometimes be a little timid, which is again one of my goals that I have for the position, if I get it, is to really kind of make it universal, and make it like, “Hey, this is what this entails.” And it’s not just SGA specifically. I know for a fact that clubs and organizations have kind of struggled across the board with numbers this year, so it would be more letting kids know that there are things here to get involved in.
Is there anything else you’d like students to know about you?
My name is David, I’m a tour guide, the vice president of student engagement, I’m the treasurer for PKE and I would like to be the vice president of marketing and communications next year for SGA. I would simply ask that if you know me and you like me, that you vote for me because everything I do is a service to the people and to use my strengths and my attributes to help everyone around me and to make this an experience that everyone can have because I’ve had an amazing Gannon experience, I’m only halfway through it so I’m excited for what’s to come, but this is a place where everyone needs to thrive and I just want to instill that ‘You scratch my back, I scratch your back,” Gannon family that we have. I just want to be another person to build in that foundation.
