As a senior Political Science major with an emphasis in International Studies and a minor in Economics, Darren Beckham was naturally attracted to getting involved with Student Government Association.

As well as being the current legislative director for SGA, Beckham is the presidential candidate for the Students Unite party.

For his party, Beckham tried to create a highly diverse group of students that may have a different outlook than him or his vice presidential candidate, Brianna Kitchings.

“We really tried to go across the university to look at different kinds of students,” Beckham said. “We have Greeks and non-Greeks, (and) we have international students and domestic students, from all different majors and different perspectives.”

Kitchings, a junior elementary education and early childhood development major, was eager to join Beckham’s campaign as vice president.

“We had the same ideas on what we wanted the future SGA to be about,” Kitchings said. “I thought Darren would be the perfect candidate for president.”

One of the Students Unite party’s major issues is helping students through the current transition period on campus.

“There are lots of things that are up in the air,” Beckham said. “A lot of construction projects that we are currently engaged in and things that we want to do to our campus.”

Through this process, Beckham hopes to allow SGA to represent the students’ perspective and act as a guide through the transition.

Although Beckham cited many long-term goals, such as increasing the overall transparency and professionalism of SGA, he also mentioned many short-term goals he hopes to personally achieve.

One of these short-term goals is addressing the issue of hunger on campus, which has been an issue brought up by many other groups. 

“I really want to make it our business to address this issue and lead the charge to really take decisive steps to help students on our campus to figure out a way to feed themselves,” Beckham said.

Beckham also hopes to modernize the SGA Constitution to include other demographics, and update some of the language.

Changes would include adding positions to more accurately portray the student body.

“Our constitution is a little bit archaic and needs to be updated,” Beckham said. “I would like to see non-traditional students and international students [guaranteed representation] in our Senate instead of by-chance from here to here.”

When it comes to student fees, Beckham, who sat on the student fees committee this year, said that it is important to make sure they maintain a “responsible rise” in student fees.

“The university has a really aggressive plan to grow and to expand,” Beckham said. “To do that, we are going to hopefully have more student fees coming in, but we also have more requests as money gets tighter across the university.”

Because of this, Beckham said SGA is going to have to ask “value-questions” to make sure important campus programs have enough funding to operate.

Even though the Students Unite presidential and vice-presidential candidates have both been involved in SGA for quite a while, they hope to see many changes within the Association if elected.

These changes include an improvement in communication within the office as well as making students aware of topics currently being tackled by SGA to gauge the opinion of the student body through surveys.

“I think there are a lot of important issues that are on the table right now,” Beckham said. “I really want to see something in the first few months of the new [administration] engaging students with a survey and asking questions about issues we might want to tackle.”

Beckham said that these surveys would not only allow students to express opinions on issues being talked about by SGA, but would bring up new issues SGA may not have considered.