Hanna Miller is set to take over from outgoing director Peter Corno.
Change is coming across the board.
The Student Association (SA) board of directors is going to look a little different starting May. 1. This comes after the spring general election where all 11 positions were up for grabs; and all were filled by new people.
As students get set to say goodbye to the academic year, so too does the SA prepare to say farewell to the current board members.
Set to step into the student experience position is Hanna Miller, a full-time student in the Business Administration Marketing program. She is also a part-time staff member with the SA’s events service.
A volunteer since the age of 14, Miller has worked in non-profit settings helping those in need and planning events.
“So, my whole life, I’ve been [a] volunteer for nonprofit organizations. So, since I turned 14 years old, I used to work in Colombia for these organizations to help kids with cancer, to help kids in not the best situations, every single day, every single day I used to work that, and also the events. I used to plan them,” she said. “And then when I moved here to Canada a year ago, I feel that I was missing something like as a volunteer, and I always love to do volunteer jobs. So, I tried to search what I can do here.”
Her search for a place where she could volunteer her time and help others lead her to the OLAS Latin club, and eventually her position working with the events team. Eventually, when the spring elections were open, she was told by friends that she should consider running for one of the open positions.
Happy with the work she was doing with the events team, the idea of running was something that would end up taking time to consider. Eventually, she decided that running would be the right choice for her as she realized “I wanted to run, because I feel like I also can help the students, and have good proposals for them.”
During the campaign, Miller had a range of promises for students. These included: extending the hours of the gym, creating entrepreneurship fairs, and starting cooking classes for students, among other items.
Miller believes in the importance of nutrition for students who have schedules filled with classes and working in part-time jobs, noting that they need the energy to get through their busy days. It’s the belief that students need to be more aware of their nutritional needs that makes the cooking classes one of the important things she hopes to get off the ground.
“I would love to have students from the chef school teach us, because that’s the way that we can also support these students from the chef school. And also, if we can do this together with SNAP, that will be perfect for me… It is important how your nutrition is, because I’m 100 per cent sure that the way that you eat is how you also gonna feel. If you have a good breakfast, you’re gonna have the whole energy for your day,” said Miller.
In addition to some of her plans for the year, the thing Miller says that she wants to do is build a stronger sense of community among the student population.
“My first thing here that I noticed, and I feel like every student’s noticed, is that we don’t have a sense of community. So, my first thing that I wanted to do, is create this sense of community, of course, with different things. But my main thing is that I wanted to create a community that they feel comfortable with. Because after COVID, I felt the students don’t like really interact to each other’s like they’re just in their own world,” she added. “I feel like the student have to be involved also in the community, because they are part of the community.”
In this year’s election, 1,302 people voted. For Miller’s race, she faced off against just one other candidate, bringing in 657 of the total votes – 62.8 per cent of the vote – compared to her competition who got 389 votes. The remaining 256 voters abstained from a choice in the student experience race.
