Ben Bolin wants to know how you’d defeat a Balrog.

It’s the first question on Bolin’s application for next year’s Academic Affairs committee chairperson. As the outgoing Senate speaker for the Missouri Students Association, hiring next year’s chairpersons was one of Bolin’s final responsibilities. In interviews, Bolin asked about surviving the Oregon Trail, which American founding father they found the most inspirational and invited applicants to draw a picture of their perfect MSA executive slate.

The challenge of facing a balrog, the creature shrouded in darkness and fire that Gandalf faces in the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of Rings,” speaks to initiative, passion, innovative thinking and team-building skills. Bolin hoped the answer would reveal the character of applicants and help him find the right people to lead MSA after he graduates.

Bolin is known for his dedication to MSA. His most obvious contributions have been fixing, simplifying and streamlining the [MSA Bylaws](http://msa.missouri.edu/resources/) and processes of student government. But he’s also made MSA a welcoming place for prospective members and more accessible to the student body as a whole. When he finished his term as Senate speaker in March, he closed a four-year career in MSA that transformed the organization into a more legitimate, transparent and functional government.

“He’s just a really inspiring leader because he is so motivated,” said McKenzie Kramer (formerly Morris), who served as Senate speaker the year before Bolin. “He makes you want to be a part of what he’s doing, and so I think even though his personality is more of a high-powered, high-energy leader, he makes you want to be as motivated as he is.”

When Bolin arrived on campus in the fall 2011, he planned on studying physics and practicing ballroom dance on the side. He wanted to challenge himself, but he had no intention of doing that through student government. But he fell in love with the energy of the MSA leaders at an introductory meeting that a few of his Schurz Hall floormates dragged him to for the free pizza. Here were people who were challenging themselves. He remembers then-MSA Vice President Emily Moon speaking and the room coming to life with cheers and whistles. He was hooked.

He found his place in the MSA Operations Committee, where he was a freshman senator who routinely wore a full suit to committee meetings. During one Senate meeting, he remembers taking five pieces of legislation to the floor, all of which fixed seemingly minor grammatical and wording errors in the bylaws.

“People were like, ‘Oh my god, Ben,’” Bolin said. “I was so obsessed with rules — they have to be perfect and they also have to be absolute. And it really kind of made me sort of a point man for MSA. People would come to me whenever they had changes in the rules. I became a point man early on, and that really helped me develop as a leader, but also kind of find my place within this group.”

Bolin said people assumed he had always been a straight-laced, down-to-business kind of guy. Although Bolin has always been interested in the rules, it started as a form of rebellion.

“There’s pictures of me — that I will not release — of me with a moustache and long hair and shirts that say, like, ‘Rebel’ across the front and this giant dragon on the back, embroidered,” Bolin said. “It’s pretty sweet.”

In Operations, Bolin went from rebelling against the rules to learning as much as he could about them. He said he saw that as a chance to “fight them from the inside.” When the Operations chairman position opened during his first semester, he applied for the job but wasn’t chosen — looking back, he said he wasn’t developed yet as a leader. The following March he was hired as Operations chairman.

“There was a huge change in how I perceived leadership during those six months,” he said. “I looked at a lot of other student leaders, which a lot of people don’t do. I looked at people like Nick Droege who was putting through a lot of big changes at that time, I was looking at Jake Sloan, who was our Senate speaker, and asking them questions of, ‘How do you do this? How do you resolve this problem?’ And observing how they do that.”

Sloan, who appointed Bolin to Operations, said in an email that he saw leadership potential in Bolin early on.

“I appointed Ben to become the chairman of Operations because he asked the important questions, even though they were not always the popular questions,” Sloan said.

Bolin was planning to overhaul of the bylaws and constitution when he was appointed. He eventually passed major changes to both, getting rid of language that was obsolete or outdated. Ben Vega, last year’s Academic Affairs chairman, said that he and his brother Bill, who serves as the Budget chairman, can’t read many MSA documents without hearing Bolin’s voice.

“They’re written in a particularly Bolin way; they’ve got exclamation points at the end of them,” Ben Vega said. “And if you know Bolin and you’ve heard him, you can just recognize that this is Ben Bolin talking to you on this piece of paper.”

Bolin also set his sights on legitimizing the election process for MSA senators. Senate had been chastised for replacing leaving senators internally — creating a sort of “boys club,” Bolin said. Instead of electing academic college seats in the fall, MSA now elects during the spring and the fall semesters, allowing for student elections, not other senators, to fill vacant seats.

During his time in MSA, Bolin was also founding and running a company, Imagine Labs LLC, which won the Missouri Energy Initiative award in 2014. He was also learning Japanese.

He decided to start teaching himself the language after a family trip to Disney World during the winter break of his freshman year. He said something clicked while he was at Epcot — he decided he needed to learn a language and picked Japanese because the Japan Pavilion was his favorite at Epcot’s World Showcase.

“Japanese is hard, physics is hard, student government is hard. I’m pretty sure I’m a glutton for punishment,” Bolin said, laughing. “If you don’t challenge yourself, then you don’t grow. A goldfish grows to the size of its aquarium, so why not expand your aquarium? Why not put a whole bunch of castles in it and then try to swim around it really quickly? That’s a weird illustration, but (it’s about) testing yourself, finding your limits.”

Bolin is graduating this year with a degree in physics. Never one to lose momentum, he will start a new challenge the Monday after graduation weekend — working toward a degree in patent law from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Bolin said for defeating any enemy — outdated bylaws, convoluted procedures, a lack of transparency, a balrog — preparation is key. He said defeating a balrog, metaphorical or not, “takes a little creativity and a team of immense skill.”