Reporting for duty


Meet SGA President Charles Mahone


Running on a campaign of following through with promises and being more visible on campus, Central Michigan University’s newest Student Government Association President Charles Mahone has a lot on his plate this fall.

But campus issues aside, many students, including incoming freshmen may not know who he is and what he plans to do to aid the student body.

Since the day he stepped foot on campus, it was his dream to one day become SGA president. Now, President

Charles Mahone has been part of SGA and since his freshman year at CMU.

The Macomb senior was elected SGA president with 75 percent of the vote in April 2014.

Before being elected president, he served the SGA senate leader.

Central Michigan Life recently had a chance to sit down with Mahone to find out the future of SGA and get to know him.

What is the first major issue you will be taking on this fall as SGA president?

I want to make sure I follow through on everything that I promised when they elected me. I was elected on specific platforms, so that’s what I want to focus on. Obviously, if student initiatives come up that are prevalent to the student body, then of course, I’ll focus on those as well, but I want to make sure I deliver what I told them I would.

With the exception of the previous vice president, Patrick O’Conner, many SGA vice presidents tend not to hold on to their position for two semesters. Are you confident your vice president, Mariah Urueta, will be able to handle the demands of the position?

That is something I considered time and time again before I asked the person I wanted to be my vice president. Mariah is truly one of the most competent individuals I have ever met in my life and I know, if it came down to it, she could be president. That is why I asked her to be my vice president, because I have full confidence not only that she can do the job, but she will do the job and do it effectively.

You launched a program working with CMUPD to notify students when they have parking tickets so that they can take care of the situation and prevent tickets from building up on a car all day. Why did you push to have this in place over the summer instead of waiting for the fall and what has its impact been?

Waiting for the fall would cosmetically look better to say “look what we did while you were all away,” but realistically there where Chippewas here over the summer, and when we are doing things in SGA, we want to affect the most CMU students as possible. In my mind, it made sense to get it out there as soon as possible so we can start benefiting students as soon as possible.

During your campaign, you stated you were going to be more proactive in reaching out to the other student organizations. Do you have a plan in place for how you are going to do that?

Because every organization is unique and every organization has its own needs, we can’t know what those are by arbitrarily saying, “you’re an RSO, you need this.” So every week, Mariah and I will be setting up meetings with a different RSO so we get those unique needs, concerns, view points and frustrations understood and work with them. Hopefully by the time we are done we can reach a huge portion of all the RSOs we have here on campus, including Greek Life, departments, everything.

Many students don’t seem to know or even care about what SGA does. How do you bring in these students and show them why they need SGA?

That is one of the biggest things we are working on. We have a new SGA logo we will be unveiling that is very clean, professional and classy and we want to make sure SGA is always presented as clean, professional and classy. With the new logo comes a new attitude. I will be speaking at Safari and presenting the new logo for all the incoming freshmen to see as well as giving away a lot of SGA swag. We want to spread our brand and who we are to let students know who we are and that we are here to help them in their daily life at central.

What are you most excited about in the upcoming year?

I’m excited to see all the change we can effect on campus. I think Mariah and I are two people who truly believe in everything we ran on, and we’re excited to see the positive change we can create for all the students here.

What are some challenges that students face that perhaps the administration doesn’t know about?

The problem is that the administration doesn’t know. They won’t know until students come to us. That is why we want to make our presence bigger this year and be more visible so students know what we can do for them. We want students to bring their issues to use so we can let the administration know and we can get the issues resolved.

When was the last time you spent a nice night out in Mount Pleasant, and what did you do?

It wasn’t really a night out, but my and some of my coworkers went tubing down the chip. That was the most relaxing time we have ever had. We were on the water for a few hours, and we just talked and chilled, had fun and enjoyed each other’s company.

If you could eat dinner with anyone from history, living or dead, who would it be, and what are you eating?

I would have dinner with Nelson Mandela, and we would be eating whatever he wants because he’s Nelson Mandela. I would love to get a glimpse into his mind. I feel like no one else on the planet thinks like him, to be in jail all that time thinking “I can’t wait to help these people unite.” Who else thinks like that? I think he was someone very special like Dr. (Martin Luther) King (Jr.) who, regardless of circumstance, doesn’t change his convictions or morals. I think it’s very rare we find individuals who are like that.

Would you rather fight a one horse-sized duck or a 100 duck-sized horses?

I think it would be smarter for me to fight 100 duck-sized horses because I think a horse sized duck would just quack my head off or something like that, and that would be scary. The duck-sized horses I can probably just kick around.

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