Andrew Rose, known to be serious and a stickler for rules, likes dressing up in a crisp suit and tie when it’s time to play the role of SGA President.
At all other times, he goes back to his Maryland sweatshirt and sweatpants — and enjoys playing pranks on his friends or sometimes ends up having them done on him.
On April Fool’s Day, he and his roommates went down to Wawa, bought as many blue plastic cups as possible and spent hours filling them up with water. In the middle of the night, they blocked their suitemates’ door with dozens of water cups, making a tower as high as the ceiling in their Montgomery Hall suite.
In the morning, the roommates opened their door to a pyramid of water cups, snuck out their front window, ran back into the suite and dumped the gallons of water under the doors of the pranksters.
“Water was everywhere; the carpet was soaked for days,” says Rose, a junior government and politics major, laughing. “It was freaking hilarious.”
But it wasn’t so funny when the joke was on him. Last year, Rose went away for a weekend to Texas for a Student Government Association meeting. Meanwhile, his friends spent hours buying drywall and covered his room door to look like another wall — with a baseboard and a strategically-placed picture to top it off.
Rose returned at 3 a.m., exhausted and ready to crash. His friends unscrewed the lightbulbs and turned off the power in the apartment, documented the whole thing on video and later posted it on the Internet.
In the video, Rose returns to his door, feels around, confused in the dark, asking, “Where the f— is my door?”
He finally sees the red light of the video camera as his friends come out of their hiding spots, laughing hysterically.
“I went on a rage, breaking down the dry wall,” he said. “I was so pissed, I was tired and just wanted to sleep.”
Known to have a 5 o’clock shadow by 11 a.m., Rose holds a professional aura when conducting business as SGA president. He’s constantly working and attends every one of his classes, leaving his room at 8 a.m. and sometimes not returning until 10 at night.
But friends know him as the Andrew Rose who likes to watch hours of Family Guy or the Andrew Rose who defiantly defends Nicolas Cage as the most versatile actor.
He grew up in Silver Spring, where he plays golf with his dad and takes his little sister out to the movies. Growing up, there was always a leadership quality about him friends and family say.
“People don’t necessarily looked up to him, but we always trusted his judgment,” says his longtime friend Brian Rankin, who goes to Ohio University. “I knew he was always going to do big things with his life.”
Rose also served on the SGA at Blake High School, where he was a big sports fan and a avid lacrosse player, something he regrets not having time for at the university. Fan participation was dying at the high school, so Rose decided to start the Blake Beserks, a basketball fan club. He made T-shirts, got people involved and built up fan support again.
He entered the university as an architecture major because he always liked calculus. But after one semester, he switched to government and politics.
“I can’t draw at all,” he says. “I never took an art class in my life.”
He doesn’t know where his love for government started, but attributes some of it to his fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Jordan, who gave him a pocket Constitution (which is listed as his favorite book on his profile on Thefacebook.com) that he still takes with him everywhere.
He even once quoted the Constitution in one of his high school classes, which he later paid for with jokes and endless teasing from his classmates.
Rose has always wanted to go to this university. He plastered his room at home with Maryland pennants, and started coming to tailgate parties before Maryland football games in his senior year of high school.
He got duped into running as area council president in Queen Anne’s Hall as a freshman. It turned out to be one of the best things he did because it was hands-down his best year in college, he says.
He’s most proud a memorial he and other students created while he was Residence Halls Association area council president for a student who lived in Somerset Hall died of a of a rare heart disease. They planted a tree, made a plaque and had a memorial ceremony, which his family attended.
“It was really touching,” Rose said. “I always go back to see flowers laid down.”
Tim Daly, who was RHA president at the time, convinced him to join SGA his sophomore year, when he became a legislator. He helped create the “Fear the Turtle” bracelet campaign, raising $15,000 in scholarship funds. Of all the things he’s accomplished in College Park — including the nights of partying and excessive movie-watching — the best has to be when he organized the Taste of College Park last year, he says.
“Everyone was running around, panicking a bit, and Andrew was completely calm,” said Nick Aragon, SGA inspector general and a close friend. “If anyone should have been going crazy, it would have been Andrew.”
Friends know Rose as being a workaholic and like that he can combine his working life with his personal life.
“The SGA is my student group,” said Rose, who considers some of the SGA legislators as his closest friends.
But friends say Rose knows how to separate the two when it comes down to business. Rose served as chairman of the ethics committee and wasn’t afraid to tell his friends when they weren’t doing their job by keeping their office hours.
“He knows where the buck stops and he’s not going to let his friendship interferes with ethics,” Aragon said. “Power corrupts and he didn’t let that get to him.”
Rose can come off as arrogant and aggressive, and one of the qualities he needs to work on is learning how to take criticism, said Kelaine Conochan, a senior government and politics major who Rose calls his “big sister.”
Rose wants to reform the SGA by improving its operations internally because he said people must unite if they want to get anything done. He says he’ll be different from previous SGA presidents Tim Daly and Aaron Kraus, who were known to be boisterous and media-friendly.
“I’m not completely infatuated with myself in seeing my name in the paper every day,” he said.
Rose has been criticized for not lobbying enough in Annapolis, but he said if legislators don’t know his face by now, they will by the end of June. He wants to create a better working relationship with all SGA presidents in the University System of Maryland to lobby together for more state funding.
His other initiatives include finding a solution to the university’s rioting problems and creating a fall break.
“I want to leave the SGA better than the way it was given to me,” Rose said.
