A  new Student Association president comes and goes every year. Often, the grand ideas of his or her platform seems phased out just as frequently.
If a quarter of the bullet points  posted outside the Union’s back door right now are recognizable on campus in five years time, I would be shocked.
I don’t think this has anything to do with the competence or the drive of the SA, which attracts some of the best students on campus to its executive positions, but things just don’t seem to work out sometimes. Even when the incoming SA president is a well-placed member of the former president’s administration, there are inevitably ideas that fall by the wayside, occasionally ideas that the former president was passionate about.
So what can a presidential hopeful do to leave a legacy with longevity?
For a policy to last a mere four years, students who haven’t even begun to think about where they’re going to college, and some who can’t even drive, will have to be involved.
This leads me to believe the SA president’s passion for his or her goals, while important to initial success, is less important to the continued success of what he or she leaves behind.
For an SA policy to last, it must fulfill a need that will be around for a long time.
Last year, the SA made a massive push to re-brand the student section as the Dawg Pound at home basketball games.
The amount of work that some very driven, intelligent people put into it is frankly unimaginable.
If you’re a freshman, and reading this, the odds are you have no idea whatsoever as to what I’m even talking about.
What was seen as a need last year wasn’t seen as necessary by the student body this year.           
And the result is the Dawg Pound has vanished completely. Conversely, a few years ago, a SA presidential candidate proposed a GPS system to track the shuttle system on campus, providing a map that updates in real time and projected arrival times of shuttles at each stop.
The candidate who proposed this actually lost the election, but that system was still implemented and exists today. Quite simply, the idea is too useful to die.
Current projects of the SA, such as the push for online teacher reviews, fall into this category as well. The need for convenient student services that keep pace with current technology is unlikely to be a temporary matter.
So, my advice to the current SA candidates is this: don’t think about what you’re going to do next year. Think about how what you’re going to do next year will be doing when you’ve stepped down or graduated.
Think about how the Bulldogs who came after you are going to carry the torch that you lit or took from your predecessor.
Think about how students in five years will remember what your administration has done, even if none of them know your name.
If you can do these things, I think you’ll be successful.