Marquette University Student Government recently passed a new amendment to help benefit student organizations when the 2019-’20 school year begins.
The new amendment, which is the first amendment passed by new MUSG president and junior in the College of Business Administration, Sara Manjee and executive vice president and senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, Dan Brophy, is set to begin next semester.
The amendment is put in place to help student organizations with their work and where to ask for help from the MUSG.
Kevin O’Finn, a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences and MUSG Chair of Student Organization committee, said the goal of the amendment is to help different student organizations and to engage with students more.
“The legislation makes the student organization committee send out 308 emails every single start to the semester to the 308 student organizations on campus,” O’Finn said.
O’Finn said the amendment is unlike anything that is available for MUSG.
“There was nothing like this before. I know they didn’t do anything like this in years past. This current year, we did it but now, it’s in the MUSG constitution,” O’Finn said.
Brophy said the idea is that MUSG can get a response from student organizations or if there is any immediate questions, they’ll be able to see that in the email.
“If they want to come in and talk, they can email us,” Brophy said. ”At a base level, the organizations know there is a student orgs committee, they know who they can go to if they need to. It will bridge a communication gap between MUSG and student organizations.”
Brophy said that the communication gap was something that MUSG had begun to see recently and recognized it was something they had to work on.
“For a couple of years, at least since I’ve been in MUSG since freshmen year, there’s always been a bit of gap between MUSG and student organizations,” Brophy said. “Part of that, there’s a ton of organizations and it can be difficult to reach out to each and every one of them. The other thing is we haven’t had any good processes in place to reach out to student orgs and the amendment is a good first step to bridge the communication gap.”
Manjee said the benefits for the new amendment are really helpful for the student organizations at Marquette.
“I think sometimes, student organizations don’t feel like we see them or hear them or go out of our way to reach out to them, in reality, we are. I think for student organizations to realize there’s someone is MUSG who’s there and can provide one-on-one support and direct them to all the different opportunities and resources that are available is really important,” Manjee said.
