The University of Maryland’s Student Government Association confirmed seven new legislative appointments at its meeting Wednesday night.
The positions had been vacant since the end of last semester.
Junior architecture and Spanish major Nilo Exar took over as the architecture college representative, sophomore history major David Anderson as the arts and humanities college representative, freshman in the business school and government and politics major Dan Alpert as the business representative, freshman biology major Kelly Sherman as the computer, mathematical and natural sciences college representative and freshman elementary education major Erin McCormick as the education college’s representative.
[Read more: SGA wants student veterans to have priority class registration at UMD]
The SGA also introduced two representatives to fill non-academic major positions: junior Humza Yahya, accounting and information systems major, as the off-campus neighboring representative and freshman public health science major Rohan Harris as the transfer representative. Harris transferred from University of Maryland, Baltimore College.
Julianne Heberlein, the SGA’s coordinator of recruitment and retention, said these students had been chosen after they filled out applications and were interviewed by four current SGA members.
“The parliamentary procedure is a little bit intimidating, and sometimes it’s scary to debate at first. I hope they get comfortable quickly, I hope they feel welcome, so that way they can adjust and integrate more easily into our organization,” said Heberlein, a sophomore government and politics and journalism major. “They all talked about really great initiatives that they wanted to work on, so I hope they’re able to get started on those and get working on them, because they were all great ideas.”
Sherman mentioned promoting an online tutoring platform as one of her goals in the coming semester.
“It’s my first time on the legislature and everything, and I’ve been talking to my friend Halle [Lerner] who was on it last semester, and she was always talking about how she got to pass bills. For three hours, they’d stay in meetings just debating, and then at the end, having a whole room unify over one thing. That really excited me,” Sherman said. “I hope this semester, things will run as smoothly as last semester.”
[Read more: A petition for refugees to be housed on UMD’s campus gains SGA’s endorsement]
The SGA is still seeking an information science studies major to fill an opening on the council.
Also at the meeting, Ashley Venneman, the SGA advisor, announced that the SGA elections would be run through the Stamp website this year instead of the Testudo homepage, which ran the risk of restricting voting hours.
The interactive web services on Testudo are only available from Monday to Saturday from 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Sundays from 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.
The SGA plans to vote at their Feb. 21 meeting on bills concerning their annual ice cream social with state legislators, a letter to Amazon to encourage them to establish their second headquarters in Montgomery County, state house and senate bills that advocate for clean energy jobs, a fundraiser for a Student Leadership Grant fund and taking their previous support of early student veteran class registration to the state level.
