On November 12, Stevens Student Government Association (SGA) will be hosting this fall’s New Jersey College Student Government Conference. This summit will take place from 9 a.m to 4 p.m. and will occur in parts of Babbio and UCC. During this time, members of student government from varying colleges all over New Jersey will be able to come together to create connections and gain useful information from seminars on relevant topics.
Alexander Stanczak, Vice President of Operations of Stevens SGA, is part of the task force that has been in charge of preparing for the conference and has stated that “this conference has been a long time coming for us.” The process of reserving time to host and planning the events of the summit is one that has spanned over a year and a half. This summit is held each fall and spring at a different host college, and SGAs at each college must sign up in advance at another summit in order to have the privilege to host it. Stevens SGA signed up at the summit at TCNJ in Spring 2022. Following this, a conference task force was formed including 7 SGA members as follows: Paulina Georgoutsos, Kevin Pfundstein, Olof Persson, Aditya Bhangale, Rebecca Los, Michelle Jacob, and Alexander Stanczak. In order to tackle all the logistics of the conference, they were broken into subcategories split up to be led by the members of the task force. After months of planning, this weekend marks the culmination of their work.
In total, 16 internal members of the Stevens SGA will be participating in the conference, with some also leading workshops throughout the day. Stanczak, for one, is leading the discussions on Sustainability and Setting and Defining Initiatives. Additionally, Kevin Pfundstein, Vice President of Finance for Stevens SGA, will be leading the Finance and Budgeting workshop, and Michelle Jacob, Chair of the Public Relations Committee, and Dr. Leo Pedraza from Student Life will be hosting the Event Planning and Publicity breakout session. Other discussions and workshops, including Student Government Structure and Leadership, Transitions and Membership Retention, Diversity and Inclusion, Conflict Resolution, Cabinet and Senator Dynamics, Burnout and Knowing Your Limit, School Administration Dynamics, Academic Operations and Affairs, and Government and Community Relations will be hosted by other members of SGA, professional Stevens staff members, or both.
Not only will the conference be an opportunity for SGA members to attend these workshops, but it will also give them the chance to build connections. Stanczak states that this is one of the parts of the conference that everyone is looking forward to since “the opportunity for networking and the ability to connect with other Student government leaders” will allow them to “gain insight into how they run their operations” to learn from each other.
The next New Jersey College Student Government Conference host will be selected at the end of the upcoming conference. Stanczak states, “Stevens SGA looks forward to once again attending another university to gain more knowledge about how we can continue to better our own SGA.”
