SGA President, Senior Jelma Flores-Mota.

UNG’s Student Government Association (SGA) has its first ever university-wide president: Senior PSIA student Jelma Flores-Mota, who was elected in Fall 2020. With COVID continuing to present challenges for students, she has her work cut out for her.

Flores-Mota’s role as SGA President is to ensure all five campuses are running smoothly. She has “to be able to represent all five campuses in an unbiased manner,” as the new president. “We will be able to tackle university wide problems. This will allow better communication with the board of regents as well,” she said.

“We the students represent the student body and we advocate and represent all UNG students while being able to create a welcoming, engaged and inclusive environment,” said Flores-Mota. “We are here to make sure that our voices as students are being heard, as well as being a liaison between students and faculty and staff.”

We asked the SGA President how she saw SGA operating in the coming months with the challenges of COVID and students not being on campus nearly as much.

“In the past, SGA has been in charge of a lot of different programming throughout the school. Constitution Day, 9-11 Remembrance Day…as well as Mr. & Ms. UNG and Homecoming Court,” said Flores-Mota. “This year with students not being on campus as much, it’s really hard to do those and to still have students interact with that and also following COVID guidelines.”

It seems that SGA is being able to manage, but Flores-Mota said that they are not getting much as engagement like they have before. They are coming up with ideas to get the student engagement since everything is virtual. SGA members themselves are meeting virtually, so that is another obstacle that they have had to continue to overcome.

“It’s [the engagement] not as high as we would like it to be,” said Flores-Mota. “But we have been able to fill a lot of these positions on SGA, even during COVID, which is not something that we thought would happen.”

The SGA President is hopeful that they will be more interactive both in-person and virtually this semester.

Visit UNG’s SGA page for information on their meetings.