Kendra Walker was recently elected as the new president of Gannon’s Student Government Association. The sophomore accounting and finance major currently serves on SGA as the vice president of finance. This week, I sat down with her to find out more about her plans, the campaign process and some little-known fun facts about our new leader.
Walker describes her platform as having two parts: internal and external. Her vision for the future of the internal affairs of the organization includes “empowering SGA representatives and enabling them to take on initiatives that really identify with their needs and strengths.” As far as external plans, Walker hopes to be “more responsive to campus needs.” During her campaign, she noticed that, “A lot of students have different concerns and interests.” She believes that “unifying students with different concerns” will lead to increased efficiency and positive change on campus.
After roughly three weeks of her grueling campaign, Walker admits that, “Running for president is a pretty intense process.” Despite the exhaustion, she found that it was important to her to “connect with students on a personal level,” because, as president, she understands that her job is to “serve the community and those relationships.” The campaign process included getting student signatures, presenting the platform, advertising with posters and flyers and maintaining communication with the student body. These tasks are difficult enough without a full schedule of classes and plenty of other extracurricular activities.
Kendra was also insistent on mentioning the gracious support of her opposition. She said that Mackenzie and Kishan were “phenomenal, always kind and always supportive.” Walker even noted that during the campaign, they were in communication about the intensity and were “really supportive of each other because only we knew how exhausting it was.” Kendra found serenity through it all by knowing that, “no matter what, SGA was going to be in great hands.”
One of Walker’s greatest takeaways from this experience was “a sense of community.” She feels that she now truly understands the phrase, “Gannon family,” and she wants to do “great things for our great community.” For Kendra Walker, it has always been about the students and that is reflected in her campaign slogan: “This is your campus and we work for you!”
Now that Kendra has been elected SGA president, you may want to get to know a little bit about her as a person. I asked her to come up with a few interesting facts about herself and I was not disappointed. First of all, she holds one particularly unpopular opinion among college students: Her “favorite thing in the world” is Excel. Yes, as in the Microsoft Office application. Although that sentence may be one of the least likely combination of words ever to be uttered, I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with her gifted math brain. In yet another strange sentence to roll off the tongue, Kendra said, “I was attacked by an ostrich once.” At this point, our conversation went off the rails as I was unable to believe my ears. If you want to hear more about the ostrich story, you will have to ask Kendra herself and I am sure that she would love to sit down with you and discuss it, as well as the possible changes you may want to see here at Gannon University.
