Aaron Rice plans to wear a lot of hats if he’s elected president of the Student Association Tuesday.”You know, the Student Association president is an advocate for students to the administration, to the city, to the state, to the legislature, to so many different people,” he said.
Rice, currently the SA attorney general, said MSU needs an SA president who can represent all types of students, and he believes he can do that.
Veterans are one group Rice wants to reach out to. An Iraq war veteran himself, he wants to create an SA committee to identify the needs of veterans, recruit them as students and work on getting a campus monument to veterans of the global war on terrorism to honor the 400-plus student veterans.
“We don’t need to wait for the typical end of the war when we all come home and celebrate so we can put some monument up,” he said. “It’s not going to work that way.”
Another project Rice wants to work on is putting student evaluations online. “I completely believe that as a student you are paying for that class and that professor, and you should have the right to see how that professor has been evaluated by previous students before you sign up for the class,” he said.
He also wants to improve student activities, the Night Route and campus shuttles and provide students transportation to away games, he said.
Additionally, Rice wants to increase civic engagement on the part of students. He plans to see through the creation of an official student advisory committee for the City of Starkville, and he wants to secure gubernatorial debates for the upcoming Mississippi election with ample seating for students.
He also wants to give back to the community, he said.
“Because we can’t just ask, ask, ask from the community and the city … without increasing what we give to the city,” he said.
Rice, originally from Hattiesburg, came to Mississippi State in fall 2002. Now a junior political science major, he took a semester off to work on Haley Barbour’s campaign in fall 2003, then used the next semester to join the Marine Corps Reserves.
He came back to MSU in fall 2003 but went to Iraq in winter 2004. That March, he lost part of a leg and spent the rest of the year recovering from his injury and learning to walk with his prosthetic.
Rice returned to school in spring 2006 and won the office of SA attorney general that year. He is a Stennis Scholar, a fellow and advisory board member in the Appalachian Leadership Honors, an RUF member and a member of the Pre-law Society. He has also served as Cresswell Hall Association president and the political science student representative on the faculty board.
He lives in Starkville with his wife Kelly.