New SGA president shares goals

By Morgan Huizar

LOGOS STAFF WRITER

Student-athlete Nicholas “Nick” Meehan is adding more to his plate this fall than he did last year when he ran footballs and the treasury for the Student Government Association.

Meehan, who is from McAllen, Texas, is succeeding Beni Resendiz as president of the SGA at the University of the Incarnate Word.

A former SGA senator, Meehan ran unopposed for president with a lot of ideas about how he wants to lead student government.

Asked to define SGA, Meehan responded: “We have been wrestling with this for a while now on what SGA is. I have come to the conclusion that it is about service, it is about improving campus life, and it is about leadership, growth and development. If you hit those three prongs, you get pretty much what SGA is all about.

“Last year in SGA, we focused on a bunch of events, which improves campus life, but if you forget about the other two which is service and leadership and development, complete scope of what SGA is.”

Leading SGA, playing football, and being a full-time student will require extra work, Meehan said.

“You kind of have to prioritize your life – and coming out of high school it really hit me.

In high school I wasn’t the best student, but I was always smart and good at football, and so I went with those two things. Then I thought ‘How can I improve myself? Because this is it. We are in college. We are paying for this now. This is like the real deal. How do we maximize that?’ I thought that I needed to do something to get to the next level.

“With all of that in mind, you have to create a schedule. So, I will always have a to-do list. And every day I will try to do the things that I have to do. If you just (keep) focused on the daily tasks, and you take the time to organize your monthly schedule, then it makes your life so much easier. If you just take things one day at a time, things will be balanced.”

Meehan said he decided to run for SGA president after learning most of its Executive Council members would be graduating or moving on.

“That leaves me with the responsibility to keep the tradition going,” Meehan said. “If you get a completely new board, then you kind of don’t understand, you have a wasted year, a learning year. But for me since I have been here, I think having my experience already in the field and obviously the fact that I am already a senior will give me the ability to run things a lot better.

“I have learned from last year. I learned (from) the mistakes. I learned the whole system, the school -- because you have to learn how it runs. That is all that I did last year as the treasurer. We are now in a great position to do some phenomenal things this next semester. I just have to teach my new board, but they are all really smart amazing people and I think we are going to do some great things this year.”

Meehan said a key factor to reaching his goals will be to improve relationships with other student organizations.

Such an approach, Meehan said, “expands our reach because we have so many resources as the (SGA). We have to find innovative ways to implement those resources instead of just doing measly events and wasting our funds. Personally, I think there is a better way to allocate those funds, and I think one of those ways is to support our organizations. Unfortunately, a lot of our organizations do not have a lot of funds. There are limitations, and if SGA could support these organizations that 

would be great. However, the hardest part about that is reaching out to the people who run those organizations, or finding out who they are. Then finding out which organizations are involved around campus. I think that is the challenge I am going to be posed with next year. So, we will see how that goes.

“I want to rebuild the system. I want to bring more people on. I want to get people engaged, but I think the focus is to try to rebuild from the interior, and then we could focus on expanding. So right now, we need to create a greater relationship with SGA team members to make sure that we all are on the same page, and then we need to create a system that gets those three focal points that I had mentioned earlier of service, leadership, and campus engagement. I think that we need to make it our vision. And then once we do that, we need to make it