Meet SGA Presidential Candidates
Cassandra Stec | cmstec@butler.edu
While there have been plenty of social media posts, flyers, and discussions around the Student Government Association Presidential election, the Carillon wanted to sit down and talk with the candidates without all the punny one-liners or endorsements. This past week, the Carillon met with Cade Chezem, junior biochemistry major, and Meet Patel, junior health sciences major, to discuss their platform and who they are as people.
Cassandra Stec: How would you describe yourself?
Cade Chezem: I think that for me personally, a lot of it comes from my determination and drive. I think that when I set my mind to something, and with help from my peers around me, then I think we're going to get what we’re going for. Also, just my adaptability; I think in the past couple years we've all had to be adaptable and change because of this situation. I think that really has helped me become better.
Meet Patel: For me, I would say service is my leading value - I’m very service-oriented. Whether it is day-to-day interactions or just taking time to volunteer my time to the community or campus. I would say I have other aspects to my personality like resilience from being a South Asian student on campus, part of a minority, a First Generation student, and an immigrant. Having come here from India, it’s about how to be resilient in terms of interactions and being accustomed to culture in this country.
CS: Why did you want to come to Butler?
CC: I’m Indiana-born and raised, so I wanted to stay close to home when I went to school. I applied to nearly every school in the state to some extent and toured a lot of them. Then, as soon as I stepped on [Butler’s] campus I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with the culture here really, everyone on my tour was holding doors open for us and saying ‘Go Dawgs’ all around campus. The culture and the family support is really the reason.
MP: I had a lot of options because I was fortunate enough to get the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship Program and that opened up a lot of doors for me that wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for that. Butler was one of my top choices because of many reasons, but also because of the access to opportunities in terms of medicine with pre-med and having all these hospitals nearby for future opportunities. I've been to the larger schools before like IU and Purdue; They’re just massive schools. I like to be able to get around and have these small tight-knit communities.
CS: Why did you want to participate in SGA?
CC: My first year, one of my roommates took me to a kick-off meeting for the SGA Senate. I told him ‘I don’t want to do it.’ At the meeting, I fell in love with it. I felt like you know what organizations you can connect with [in those small groups], but SGA could give you a chance to connect with everybody on campus. Then each year I felt like I was able to grow with it.
MP: SGA was never on my radar to put it short and sweet. Cade got me interested in thinking about it in the first place. My first two years on campus I was involved in a lot. We ran into each other a lot like for the South Asian Student Association and other organizations I’ve been a part of. Ever since coming to campus, I’ve been exploring what I’m passionate about; that’s really been my motto. I really wanted to take my time and mold myself but SGA never happened to be one of those things because I never perceived it as something I could serve others through. When Cade came to me and talked to me about this opportunity to be the Apartment Village Senator and chair the DESB [Diversity, Equity, and Student Belonging] Committee, it dawned on me that this is an opportunity to serve the student body and my peers in a way I hadn’t thought of before.
CS: What have been your past roles or affiliations regarding SGA or campus life in general?
CC: I was the Liberal Arts and Sciences Senator for two years, then I was elected to the Speaker of the Senate. Outside of SGA, I started the Patachou Foundation; it’s an organization that works on food insecurity and equity in the community. We go to IPS [Indianapolis Public Schools] after school and serve meals to students. We also do education initiatives too. I’m also a member of the pre-med Society and some other organizations more towards my major.
MP: This is my first year in SGA - I’m the Apartment Village Senator and the Diversity, Equity, and Student Belonging Senate Committee Chair. In terms of other organizations on campus, I’ve been on the Interfaith Council and I served as the Campus-Wide Interfaith Intern through the Center for Faith and Vocation (CFV). I’ve also been a part of the South Asian Student Association (SASA) because I was born and raised in India, so I’m really passionate about sharing South Asian culture and traditions. I’m currently co-president of SASA. I was also on the executive board for Timmy Global Health and the Lilly Scholars Network and Period at Butler. It’s been a little bit of everything, but it’s all about things I’m passionate about.
CS: How has your time at Butler prepared you for this role?
CC: I keep talking about it, but we’ve worked on understanding internal operations – how it works – and building working relationships with university officials and administration, and different departments and different colleges on campus. We’ve done various different things in the Senate this year, so we’re able to have that network where we can go out and hear concerns, provide advocacy for students and work for them based on what we’ve heard. Students don’t have to go search or try to connect with somebody. We already know them, and we can just go out and talk to them or set up a meeting. I think that’s a huge thing to have. It’s also important to know the internal processes and how to get stuff done effectively in SGA. We can continue to improve what needs to be worked on and continue to do the things that have been solidified.
MP: I think I can provide a little bit of a different perspective. I’m relatively new to SGA and I bring a couple of years of experience from the campus community outside of SGA. I’m not as familiar with some of the internal operations and connections, but that’s something I’ve been learning more about. But, I would say that doesn’t take away from my experiences and involvements in other student organizations. I’ve been able to cultivate a lot of great relationships with not only students from the CFV communities and the Diversity Center organizations, but also University administration that are involved with both communities. I want to work on how to leverage those connections to create the best experience on campus.
CS: Cade, what do you hope to bring to the position of President that you don’t think has been seen before?
CC: I think that every year Presidents come in and promise transparency, but that’s an outcome that we’ve never seen to the extent that I want to bring to it. Students deserve to know the decisions that are being made within SGA, but they also deserve to know the thought process behind it. We want to be as transparent as possible. One way is to proactively publish the budget. Students need to know where money is being spent, how it’s being spent, and whether it’s being spent proactively or not. We want to bring feedback from students, we want to bring in their voices.
CS: Meet, what are some initiatives or changes you’d like to bring to the position of Vice President that you don’t think have been seen before?
MP: I don’t really have too much background on what’s been done before by past Vice Presidents, but I do know that I want to improve on what I have been seeing this year in terms of supporting the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Student Belonging, who is currently Maya Sanchez. I believe that the person in this position needs more support from the executive leaders, which are supposed to be the VP and President. I think that my experiences in the CFV and Diversity Center really allow me to provide great support to this position to lead the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives we plan on meeting. I also think we need more DEI training and opportunities for the rest of campus. We talked about how we want to make those more accessible to SGA and Greek Life as well. We want to make it as accessible as possible because we want it to be a part of the culture of this campus, not just something that’s a checkbox.
CS: What’s the reasoning behind your platform?
CC: This year, through all the different operation issues that we’ve seen, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from students. We know we need to be adaptable, but everyone is talking about the traditions we used to have like BITS (Bulldogs in the Streets) and we want to create solutions to bring those back and create new ones. There is also a mental health crisis here and somebody has to acknowledge it whether it’s SGA or the university – but it should be both in our opinion. We heard all these concerns from students and we wanted to compact them into a platform that we can provide to students. At the debate I think we said, it’s a platform for you, built by you. It’s not our platform, it’s our campus’s platform.
CS: Do you think any points on your platform will receive any pushback? If so, how are you prepared to pivot and deal with it?
CC: I think that we've already seen a little bit of pushback from the university on our platform points. We know the university might get a little scared with some of our marketing. We use the #fraternallyyours, referring to the Greek Life incident that happened earlier this semester. We’ve seen some areas where the university has failed a little bit and hasn’t been as transparent in their communications. We’ll see a little pushback, but we’re prepared to bring and utilize the full support of SGA and those relationships that I talked about. Through utilizing those working relationships and sitting down to discuss, there’s got to be reasonable solutions to everything.
MP: On a different part of our plan platform that deals with tradition, there hasn’t been pushback, but there's been some healthy discussion in terms of what it means to revitalize traditions on this campus and allowing students to come up with new traditions. I’ve had a chance to sit in on a CFV incoming scholar interview process and some of those high schools talked a great deal about Butler traditions they’ve heard about. When they step foot on campus, what are the traditions they’ve heard about and what will they experience? What discrepancies will there be? We plan on letting students come up with their own traditions, but at the same time, some students are going to come in with expectations on what it means to be a bulldog. We’re doing our best to bring them back to the Butler Way.
CS: What do you want students to know regarding you and your campaign?
CC: Authenticity, we want people to see who we really are. We’re not two guys that walk around in suits and act like we’re the elitist SGA. We’re friends and allies of students here, just like everyone else. I just want them to see that we’re down to earth. We’re fun guys, we posted pictures of us playing ping pong for social media, stuff like that. We’re putting ourselves out there.
MP: We want the students to think of us as their peers. As President, that doesn’t make us any different of a person or student than any of the students on campus. We want to make sure that we’re approachable.
CS: What do you want to do after your time here at Butler?
CC: We’re both pre-medical students and are stressed with studying for the MCAT right now. We both plan on going to medical school, after that I plan to come back to this community – or an Indiana community, I should say. I want to practice medicine around here in a community that has given a lot to me and so I want to give back to it.
MP: We’re in the process of the most stressful process right now and it’s only going to get more stressful after this; but I think that speaks to our service-oriented mindset because, despite all these stepping stones we have coming up in terms of our career, we’re still able to dedicate time to the student body. It just speaks to the fact that we’re not doing this for titles. We’re doing this because we are genuinely passionate about the student body and helping them.
CS: What kind of impact do you hope to bring to others?
MP: One of the biggest things I try to live by is meeting people where they’re at. This can look very different for different types of people, right? We have many different communities on campus and we want to meet those different communities where they’re at. We don’t want to do things in a blanket sense. The Diversity Center has different needs on campus than the different student groups in the different colleges. In SGA, we want to try to reach different groups and communities of people where they’re at. I think if we can accomplish that, we can have a positive impact on this campus.
CS: Is there anything else you want the students to know?
MP: I think it's important for students to vote. I mean, I personally haven’t voted in the past. I didn’t because SGA has had a certain perception in terms of alienating the student body. It’s that thought and culture that we’re trying to change and something we’ve already started to change this year through community outreach. There’s just one thing we’d like students to know and that’s to take two seconds to go online, use that link to vote, and have their voice heard.
Students will be emailed a link regarding voting on Monday, February 21st. Additional information on Cade and Meet’s campaign can be found on their Instagram, @cade.meet.sga.
The Ford Daas campaign was reached out to on February 14th and again on February 16th without a timely response. A response was received on February 19th via a phone call, a day after this article was due, and an email response was sent from the Ford-Daas campaign later that evening into the early morning. Due to the lateness of their response, past the deadline, the staff writer was unable to include them in this article. For more information about the Ford Daas campaign, visit their Instagram, @forddaasforsga.