Mississippi State University Student Association’s newly elected Senators for the 2016 term met and mixed with the 2015 Senate for the first time this Tuesday, the first of two meetings where the new senate and executive counsel will shadow the current administration before being officially sworn on Feb. 26 during the SA banquet. 
    2016 SA Vice President Hunt Walne said he was excited about the new group, and looks forward to advancing the SA’s agenda with them. 
   “It went really well,” Walne said. “The new Senate is a little different because of the at-large seats and the lowered student-count per seat.”
   Incoming SA President Roxanne Raven said she is looking forward to her term. While the transition process is particularly involved for her as she has to not only adjust to the Presidential role, she said  she also has to help ease Walne into the VP role she is simultaneously leaving. 
Raven said she has begun meeting members of MSU’s administration in an official capacity, and said they seem eager looking forward to working with SA and Raven’s administration. 
   “Now is one of the best times to be SA President,” Raven said. “The administration seems to be greeting the next SA terms with open arms.”
    Before the election, the Senate passed a motion increasing the number of senators-per-student by lowering the representation per-capita from 650 students for every Senate seat to 550 students for every seat. This increase, in addition to the new      at-large seats, brings the senate count up from 31 senators last year to 49. 
  “There are a whole lot of new people now,” Walne said. “I think that will be great. More voices, more debate. I’m really excited about mixing it all up.”
   Layton Little, a sophomore who represented the Freshman class last term and is now filling an at-large seat, said the expanded Senate will do a lot to increase their ability to represent students.
Having just spent a term as a Freshman representative, Little was particularly keen on the plans to add seats to the Freshman Senate, which has had four seats for the last few terms. 
Raven said the immediate plan is to add an additional seat.
  “That number has been stagnant for a while, so we want to make sure we grow (Freshman Senate) along with the rest of SA,” Raven said.
Walne said he has plans to introduce a new committee to be filled by Freshman Senators called the Research and Development Committee.
Mary Elizabeth Stringer, returning senator for the college of education and 2015 SA committee chairman, said the Research and Development Committee would be tasked with taking the general ideas and rough plans of the Executive Council and other Committees, and spend the term researching other school’s SA’s similar policies and programs.
    “This will do a lot to help the Freshman Senators get a handle on things as well as take a load off of the other committees’ shoulders,” Stringer said.  
While the Committees are chaired by SA senators who are appointed by the Executive Council and are more centered around maintaining and making policy, balancing budgets, and representing the student body’s voice through dealings with the MSU administration, SA Cabinet is open to any student at MSU to participate in. Stringer said the Cabinet is a way for students who are not on Senate to participate in SA programs. 
   The Cabinet’s job is to actually make SA programs and events happen. 
   Similar to how Senate and Executive counsel has been restructured this year, Walne said the committees have also been altered. For this next term, there will be six committees in total, ranging from the Rules and Internal Affairs committee that works with SA internal policy, to the Student Affairs Committee that presided over things such as community engagement, diversity, and student life. 
    “The schedule right now is pretty packed,” Raven said. “Which is both good and bad at the same time. Overall everything is going really well though.”