MSA President Miyah Jones and Vice President Cydney Perkins discuss their journey towards their MSA positions and what their hopes are for this term.
Transparency is key for Missouri Student Association President Miyah Jones and Vice President Cydney Perkins, who have spent the last couple of months working in hopes to make MU’s campus a more accessible environment for students of all backgrounds.
In March 2023, MSA held their executive elections, where two presidential slates campaigned against each other. Jones and Perkins ran as Mizzou4U, with their main objectives being split into three tenets: circulating knowledge, allocating resources and establishing an inclusive culture for MU students. Their campaign honed in on aiming to make MU a more transparent campus, in addition to helping underrepresented students feel empowered.
“Especially in the black community, and other underrepresented minorities as well, there is a sense of imposter syndrome, especially when entering like PWI and majority white spaces, that like, I’m not good enough, or I’m not qualified,” Perkins said. “No one would vote for me. They don’t get me. Those feelings definitely arise. But we definitely want to break those barriers down. Because at the end of the day, we all got into Mizzou…It was really encouraging and really made us smile to see that more students that look like us are getting involved and are trying to figure out ‘hey, what is available to me, what do I have access to?’”
Jones and Perkins won the election with almost twice as many votes as the opposing slate, securing them the MSA executive positions as the first co-running Black, female president and vice president of MSA.
“[The name ‘Mizzou4U’] established how we look at things when it comes to the student body, and making the student body feel validated and reassured is above all,” Perkins said.
Jones and Perkins first met when they were training to be Summer Welcome leaders in 2022.
Jones and Perkins have been involved students during their time at MU. Along with MSA and Summer Welcome, Perkins has participated in the Alumni Association Student Board, MU Black Pre-Law Students Association, The National Society of Black Engineers and was a senator in the Legislative Black Caucus. Jones has been a part of the Mizzou Black Women’s Initiative, was a manager for the women’s basketball team and is a member of the MU Black Pre-Law Students Association and Phi Alpha Delta.
MSA and the Graduate Professional Council work with MU administration to support two student-led auxiliaries, Tiger Pantry and Truman’s Closet, which are projects that address the needs of the students and often become full-fledged programs as they develop. Tiger Pantry and Truman’s Closet aim to provide food and clothes, respectively, to students who may need them. As vice president, Perkins directly works with these auxiliaries, in addition to working on a project she started last year called Filling In The Space that is working to encourage more Black and Brown students to join organizations.
MSA has also been working to revive the STRIPES program, which was originally meant to help students get safely home from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. at no cost.
“We hope to have STRIPES back up and running by the beginning of next semester at the latest,” Jones said.
“Obviously, we don’t agree with everything that goes on here, but we have a love for Mizzou at the end of the day, and we just want it to be better and just want to do whatever we can to make it better with all the powers that we have,” Jones said.
They spoke at events like First Roar and Pizza with the President, and were actively participating in the Homecoming Parade and MSA Week. They emphasized an importance to try and make it to as many events as possible so the student body has a chance to get to know their representatives.
As leaders, Jones and Perkins said it is important for them to remain transparent and accessible to the student body. They have an open-door policy, which means people can come into their office at any time during the day and ask questions, make suggestions or simply get to know them.
“People just kind of come to us and tell us those things, and that just kind of goes back to why we wanted to run in the first place, we already had that about us. People will just bring stuff to us because they knew that we were well connected,” Jones said.
Perkins said students don’t really know about the work administration is doing, and how impactful their decisions can be on students. Jones and Perkins want to avoid that lack of communication by being as transparent about their initiatives as possible. This means they have to be honest if they can’t directly solve a student issue, and Jones said they aim to find alternatives and solutions to issues that affect students. One example was that some students didn’t feel comfortable enough to speak freely to administrators, so they decided to reshape semesterly town hall meetings to be a Round Table Talk in order to encourage more conversation.
“There’s another route you can take. Honestly being transparent, you’ll probably get the end goal that you want, you just have to reevaluate how you get there,” Jones said.
Jones and Perkins reflect back on the goals they set at the start of their administration and what they hope to see for future students at MU before they leave the office in Spring 2024.
“For the most part, we just hope that we can see others like us come in right behind instead of it being spread out. We just want to give other people a chance at the table as much as possible,” Jones said. “It’s really, really important to us that that does happen and we’re working behind-the-scenes to see how we can make that happen.”
In upcoming months, Jones and Perkins would like to continue to work to make resources and information more accessible to the student body, in addition to breaking barriers that students may face at MU. They hope their initiatives are just the start.
“The biggest lesson has been that I can’t change the world. I would like to think I could, but I really can’t. It’s just my duty and responsibility to make sure that I lay my step on the uncompleted staircase that someone else can build off and get to the point where we hopefully one day have a full staircase,” Perkins said.
Edited by Annie Goldman | agoldman@themaneater.com
Copy Edited by Grace Knight | gknight@themaneater.com
Edited by Sophie Rentschler | srentschler@themaneater.com