Junior Rishabh Sen was elected as president of the student body for the Ithaca College Student Governance Council for the 2024–25 academic year May 3. Sen served as the vice president of campus affairs for SGC during his first and sophomore years.

Staff Writer Eamon Corbo sat down with Sen to discuss his role as SGC president and his plans for the school year.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Eamon Corbo: Why were you interested in being the SGC president?

Rishabh Sen: Ever since my first year on SGC … even spanning back to high school and middle school, student leadership and student advocacy have been two things that I’ve been very interested in. So in terms of student advocacy, I think that a college is of course this large space, it’s really a microcosm of the real world and its people — the students, the faculty, the staff — are impacted by real problems, and I think that they need not only an outlet, but … a place or a people that can facilitate them. … I think that that part of leadership has always really stood out to me: being able to boost someone else’s voice.

EC: Have you made any progress achieving any of your goals as president?

RS: I’d like to think so. I think that right out the gate, actually even over the summer, what I really wanted to work on is encouraging more students to feel that they can be student leaders and have the confidence to become part of the student governance council and really advocate for themselves, their peers, their communities. … A big priority for me during this beginning part of the year has been … trying to get the word out, but equally mentoring. … I’ve now led a couple different workshops over the year. I’ve led retreats, and we actually [had] a Senate retreat [Sept. 23] to try and teach our younger senators … transferable skills that they might need in this role.

EC: Even with the recent election, there are still a good amount of empty senator positions at SGC. How do empty positions affect SGC and the work you do as president of the student body?

RS: If we’re on a scale of one to 10, where like zero is there’s no one in SGC, and 10 is every position is filled, we’re at a good seven. I think that with elections with such a large campus population … we still don’t have the reach to reach all 4,000 people. … So, I’m actually encouraged by the fact that we have those open spots because as students hear about these positions and get excited about it, we can actually confirm them to the Senate, and they don’t have to wait for the next year. We really want to keep our doors open. It was actually my priority that if all the positions filled up, I really wanted to … create more positions, just so we have them open. In terms of how they impact the organization … there’s only one of [each open] position. … We’re still hoping to get the perspectives of those groups or those identities from the other people in those positions.

EC: At SGC you — especially as the president — are responsible for communicating with administration and representing the student body. I was curious about how you plan to communicate concerns of the student body with administration?

RS: President Cornish … [has] really turned the [students’] perspective of the administration. … Students feel much more connected to the administration, in my opinion at least. … The general consensus I get from the student body is that they worry that their problems are too small or … too isolated to [go] through the administration. … I want to revitalize a form of communication that we do in SGC, which is the town hall meetings. I want to bring back the style of low-stakes advocacy, if you will, where students can come in and speak to other students who might be less intimidating, or … speak to SGC members about what their problems are.

EC: What are you hoping to achieve by the end of the year?

RS: By the end of the year, my three main goals are that … every one of my executive board members who has a vision today …  [makes] significant progress by the end of the year, and if I have helped them get to that stage, that’s kind of the tick mark for myself. … I want to see more stability within SGC. There’s less of like, “Oh, how do I do this process again?” It’s more self sufficient. … Lastly, I want SGC to be more visible to the student body. I think that students sometimes don’t even know that … they have this governing body that can actually advocate for them on the daily. So, I want SGC to become a household name.