The Wayne State College student body voted and selected Addie Hejl and Ashley Schemek as the new president and vice president for Student Senate on Friday, Feb. 24. 

According to Hejl, the two were sitting in Schemek’s dorm room when they received the exciting news at 5:07 p.m. and immediately freaked out when they found out that they were the new selected representatives for the student body.   

“It was really exciting,” Hejl said. “It was a lot of relief. I know for both of us it was a really stressful week of just trying to balance class and campaigning and a lot of our extracurriculars, so I think that it was a lot of relief, just knowing that it was over, and I know we’re going to have a stressful year ahead with everything but I know we’re excited for it.” 

According to both Hejl and Schmeck, the campaign was stressful yet worth it.  

“We got to meet so many new people through it,” Schmeck said. “We did a tabling in the Student Center, at the same time as the basketball game. We still got to interact with so many new people and they just wanted to know what we are going for and what we wanted to do and it was amazing.” 

In addition, Hejl and Schmeck considered that the reason they chose to campaign is because they both saw things on campus that they wanted to see change for the better and really wanted to be the two leaders to solve problems and be a friendly face on campus. 

As a campaign, both Hejl and Schemek had proposed a lot of new ideas to make the campus a better place to learn and grow on. Some of these ideas include flexible seating in the library, a brand-new volleyball court and more support for the mental health for faculty and students on the WSC campus.  

“Some of our ideas for campaigning were brought to us by other students and other senators [for] things that they want to see changed and we had a lot of support throughout the way and that made it so much more possible,” Hejl said.  

Hejl had advice for any future presidents or vice presidents. 

“I would just say go for it,” Hejl said. “We learned a lot along the way, not that we didn’t know what we were doing but there were just so many things that we didn’t even know were problems on campus and we were able to learn so much about the campus and students and the faculty while campaigning it was just a great opportunity. I would say if you’re thinking about, just do it because we would rather have five sets of candidates instead of only one.”  

The new student representatives are excited about what they can bring to campus to hopefully make the campus a better place to live, work and learn on for everyone.