The Student Government Association at Wichita State is about to hit a big milestone– its 100th birthday.

To help kick off the festivities Luis Carbajal, SGA president, created a Programming Committee that will plan events for SGA. Grant Rains, a senior majoring in political science, was selected to become the first Programming Committee Chairman in June.

“SGA has always been a part of campus life and our 100th birthday is the perfect time to show how we play a role at WSU,” Rains said. Elected last spring, he was a first-term at-large senator for SGA when he applied to be chairman.

“We want to host events that celebrate the SGA’s 100th birthday,” Rains said. “SGA has been around longer than any other group and it has evolved in so many way and we want to share this story with the students. “

Rains would like to host events and partner with other registered student organizations, the new office of Student Involvement and the local community. “Some events you can look forward to- Student vs. Faculty flag football game, a rock the vote event, SGA sponsored athletic events and hopefully some cool competitions where students can win some big prizes.”

“Wichita State was given a set of goals by the Kansas Board of Regents Foresight 2020,” Rains said. He said one of the goals is to increase student retention rates, something SGA hopes to do by engaging the student body through events.

“SGA planned events in the past but that faded away in recent years,” Rains said. “There is a big lack of student engagement on this campus so every group needs to host events to engage their audience.”

Event though the Student Activity Council usually dominates events on campus, Rains said SGA isn’t trying to step on any toes. “We aren’t programming events that overlap with SAC nor are we trying to compete,” Rains said. “Just like any other organization on campus we have milestones and we would like to celebrate them. “

SGA accomplished some big goals this summer according to vice president Olivia Sullivan. “It’s gone really well, we got a lot more done then I thought we were going to,” Sullivan said.

“We just looked at all of our deadlines and we have a lot of things that we’ve been working on all summer that are going to be wrapped up right before school starts,” she said. “All of our projects are going to finally come to life.”

“The other thing we’ve done is completely revise the SGA journal which has our constitution, our statutes, our bylaws, our resolutions,” Sullivan said. “It governs SGA and it governs a lot of policies for students in terms of getting funding. It had so many loopholes and other things in it that we just had to get rid of.”

SGA will resume senate meetings on August 15th, Sullivan said.

Sullivan said there are still a few senator positions that need to be filled. SGA has already received four applications for the open positions which Sullivan said could be a good sign of getting quality candidates.

SGA took time this summer to tour several facilities around campus including Student Health Services, the Child Development Center, and the Sunflower.

“We’re going to Omaha next week to tour their health facilities so that we can hopefully have some insight into changes we need to make to our health facilities here,” Sullivan said.

“One of the new things we’ve instituted this summer is stricter deadlines for completing projects,” Sullivan said. “Because there’s are always a lot of cool ideas floating around in SGA but we’ve never had a good system for deadlines and completing tasks.”

Both Sullivan and Rains spoke of SGA’s larger mission this year– shaping a WSU community that feels comfortable approaching and petitioning SGA.

“We want to host events to share more about the SGA, so that students know what we do and feel comfortable talking to us and giving us their ideas,” Rains said.

“This committee might just be a one year thing for the 100th birthday, but if students like it, we will keep it around.”