(Bri Nitsberg | Student Life)

Senior Emily Chen, the outgoing Student Union (SU) President, sat down for an interview with Avi Holzman, one of Student Life’s Editors-in-Chief, on April 5 ahead of the SU inauguration on April 11. The conversation covered topics from past Q&A’s, reflections on the year as president, WILD funding, and what she will take with her from this experience after she graduates. The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

Student Life: What was the highlight of your term? 

Emily Chen: An article just went out this morning talking about a really big project that SU has been working on this entire whole year, which is the Student Union Leadership Award. Our goal is to recognize and support passionate student leaders. The award is intended to help students balance all of their responsibilities while still being able to make a positive impact on our campus community. 

SL: Why would you say that is the highlight of your term?

EC: At the beginning of the school year we were informed of a very large carry-forward fund that none of us knew about, and we had the opportunity of doing something with it, which ended up being the creation of this leadership award. Seeing all of our efforts and discussions and communications and compromising with administrators actually come through to become a fruitful thing that’s actually happened is why I think it’s the biggest successful highlight of my semester. Through that process I hit a lot of my own personal goals I had when entering the role, building strong connections and relationships with administrators. 

SL: In the fall you mentioned that the two things you really wanted to nail for this to be a successful term were building connections with admin and getting the entirety of SU to operate as a cohesive unit. Based on that, has this year been a success for SU and for you?

EC: I think we definitely had our hardships in terms of unifying SU, and I think that is always going to be something that depends on the people in the organization, which we don’t control. Every student comes to SU with their own personal passions and ideas and, though I might not personally agree with all of them, it’s my job to uplift student leaders and to push them to succeed in their own way. Senate has chosen to take on a lot of difficult tasks and stayed strong in what they believed in, which is honestly something to admire, because it’s not easy to stand by your own beliefs even when other people are critiquing you. However, that has made it a little bit difficult in SU to function cohesively when we have fundamental differences on what we believe. As a whole, I would say SU has had a successful year, and I definitely do think that the net impact or net change of SU this year was positive. I would deem it as successful overall.

SL: Another thing I remember you hammered both in your platform and when we first talked was taking a more data-minded approach to solving problems. I’m wondering if you could give an example of when in your term you did that.

EC: Mishka [Narasimhan] and I have been attending the student survey committees pretty consistently and we’ve seen the data that comes out of that. Also similarly, Hussein [Amuri] hosted the tuition forum, which is basically full data on how the University spends its money, and those are all elements that kind of feed into the SU Leadership Award and why we wanted to do something like that. We want all students to have access to it because regardless of the hours you’re putting in or your financial aid and those financial aspects, the passion that these students put into their student groups is incredible. We have 400+ incredible student groups, all led by very passionate students, and we want to find a way to reward them and show that we as SU care and want to continue to support this leadership within student groups. 

SL: Looking back on the year, Emily, what was the biggest challenge for you?

EC: The biggest challenge is recognizing the importance and the nuances of the role of being student body president and balancing that with your own personal opinions and when you can express them and when you cannot because you’re representing thousands of students who all have unique views. Students come to me with all different opinions. I hear them out. I communicate them to administrators, and I share their perspectives. That is what I see myself as, as a vessel to absorb information and opinions of students and pass it on to administrators to try to help them make the best changes for this campus. And obviously, the events that have happened in this semester were not events we would ever wish to occur. So, to any students out there, we do not take anything lightly. The pressure on us to find the right things to say is also constantly there.

SL: Given all of that pressure, how did you go about taking care of yourself and making sure you didn’t go crazy? Maybe you did go crazy.

EC: I did go crazy (laughs). I think it actually helped the exec board bond a lot because we all talked about it and just kind of shared our own stories. While I’m not directly impacted by [the latest Israel-Hamas war], I resonate with pieces of it so I think it hit home for a lot of us in very specific ways. We tried our best to stay professional in our roles as much as possible to the best of our abilities while also talking to each other and talking to our advisor on the best way to go about addressing it without putting ourselves in more typical spaces. I think the hardest thing is that students forget that we’re also students, and so they yell at you, just throw all their emotions and hate, and someone has to absorb all that. So, being emotionally strong is very important, and I do typically pride myself on my ability to stay calm and collected, but some pieces of it do resonate with pieces of my own life experience. That’s where I think it’s the hardest thing is that, being in a leadership position, people make so many assumptions about you, and what they assume you believe and what they assume you’ve been through, and I think that’s incredibly unfair. When students share things with me, I try my best. I take them very seriously and do my best to follow up in the best way possible about it, but there’s only so much I can do as a fellow student.

SL: This year SU drastically increased the budget for WILD. How do you think that will benefit the student body in the future? Talk about that decision some more. 

EC: [SU] is unique in the sense that no other department on this campus gets the same type of increase we do where it’s bound to tuition. So when tuition increases this next year for 4.5%, our budget also increases by 4.5%. So the SU budget this year alone because of the tuition increase increased nearly $400,000. We recognize how much more funding is needed for student groups, and we have a significant amount where we felt comfortable that WILD could be significantly increased without impacting student group funding. So this increase is not crazy at all, and it’s not unique to us.

SL: Do you think that number will go up?

EC: We’ll see how student group spending goes, and depending on what WashU chooses to do with this new space that they acquire, and we’ll see how things play out. I can’t make this decision, but I think the WILD talent with a budget going forward will be able to stay stable around this amount in the future, unless there’s some major change.

SL: Another thing you guys hit on a bunch was funding for cultural affinity groups. Talk to me about that. How did the funding of those groups in particular go this year?

EC: In the past, if you looked at a pie chart of how much student groups are requesting out of the total budget, and then you have how much they are allocated, it doesn’t match. But with the new change of financial guidelines of allowing cultural diversity groups, what we consider a social for them has been loosened so they’re able to have more social events because by nature those groups are looking to build a community. So by softening that line for them, we’re able to fund more events. If you look at the pie chart [now], it’s significantly evened out where the requests and allocations actually match pretty well compared to previous years. So that’s where we see an increase in funding for those groups because they’re now able to request more, because we’re being more flexible with the events that they’re allowed to plan.

SL: Imagine instead of me sitting here, President-elect Hussein Amuri is sitting here. What do you think is the biggest piece of advice you’d give to him, and what do you think is the biggest challenge that he will have to face?

EC: Don’t take yourself too seriously, and don’t lose yourself in this role. Stay true to your own priorities and goals, and remind yourself that at the end of the day, no matter how frustrated or how difficult this job gets, it is student government in college. You have your entire future ahead of you. Take a deep breath, calm down, and don’t spend too much time in the office. Drawing those boundaries for yourself is the most important thing. This place has given me a sense of purpose, and your next part of life will be a whole new adventure. 

SL: What have you learned from this role that you’ll take with you after college? 

EC: When I was a freshman, I didn’t want to touch politics. But then you realize that everything is political, you cannot avoid it. At the same time, there is still a way to navigate it gracefully. I’m still learning how to do that. In terms of what I’ll take away from SU, I learned how to navigate and how to work with people who you don’t agree with. There’s not many opportunities where you are constantly working with all different types of unique people, and it’s really helped me calm down, become more patient, and become a better listener. I’ve dramatically calmed down and become less impulsive and erratic in terms of my decision-making. I try to gather all the facts and make sure I make the most informed decision because I want to avoid making the wrong one, but sometimes there is no right or wrong. Also, cherish the bonds that you make because in the end, regardless of all the interpersonal conflict and all the professional differences, those friendships are the ones that will last. Forget about the petty things, just focus on the fact that post-college, you’re going to forget and you’re going to laugh about all the drama, and what really is going to matter is the friendship that you built with that person.