Although Missouri Students Association president Julia Wopata wasn’t in Columbia this summer, she still worked toward accomplishing her platform’s goals and improving relationships between MSA senators and the executive branch.
She spent the summer in Boulder, Colorado working as a software engineering intern for Google. Still, she was able to communicate with administration and MSA members to accomplish her goals for the year.
One of these goals was to improve mental health resources for students, a goal which Wopata said is possible thanks to the help and cooperation of administrators. Wopata said administration is working to improve the communication between resources like the Counseling Center, the Student Health Center and the Wellness Resource Center.
Along with the goals from her platform, Wopata has also made improvements in terms of MSA relationships.
“I think that there has been a significant improvement because Connor [McAteer] and I came in eager to talk to them,” Wopata said.
She credits much of the improved relationships to the SEC exchange conference, where MSA members traveled to Lexington, Kentucky in July to work with other SEC student governments on ideas to better the university.
“I went to the SEC exchange with all of the senators and that was a great experience to catch up with people,” Wopata said. “It was also great to strategize on where we hope to see the year go and get inspiration from the other student governments. Really, I learned that we all have a lot of similar issues that we’re dealing with because of the nature of student government.”
Senate speaker Jacob Addington said that by bettering communication between the executive branch and senate, MSA will function better overall.
“One of the big reasons I see is in years past it seems like exec is working on one project and they don’t want senate to be involved and senate will do the same thing,” Addington said. “In actuality they’re really trying to accomplish the same thing and if they would’ve teamed up things would be accomplished a lot quicker. I think that’s gonna be the biggest change that we see this year, with collaboration on both sides we’ll be able to get a lot more done and work more effectively.”
_Edited by Morgan Smith | mosmith@themaneater.com_