Q&A with Student Body President-elect Elizabeth Adkins

After a prolonged election cycle, Elizabeth Adkins was declared the student body president for the 2017-18 school year on Friday. Staff writer Molly Looman spoke with Adkins, whose inauguration is set for April 4, about her plans.

The Daily Tar Heel: What was it like to win?

Elizabeth Adkins: It was incredible. It’s been a really long journey. It was a lot longer than all of us expected, but we were so excited and thankful in that moment we were announced — receiving the majority of the vote. I think what we’re most excited for is to just be able to hit the ground running and implement our policies and our platform we’ve been so excited about for so long, and to finally see that dream come to fruition was an incredible feeling.

DTH: What are your next steps?

EA: It was an unusual election cycle in that fact that we were just elected and we just now have a student body president-elect whereas it should have been in February, but now inauguration is April 4, so we knew going into this whoever won, it was going to be a very quick turnaround ... and once we are able to have an administration moving forward, we’ll be able to make decisions about the cabinet, committee members and things of that nature.

DTH: How are you going to select your vice president, treasurer and other executive positions?

EA: So they go through a selection team which is made up of current executive branch officers, so members of the Opere administration do all of the selection process there, but of course they’ll select the most qualified candidates, and then we will come together and select our officers.

But I think, personally, what I’m really looking for in my close team are just people who just truly believe in our message and our vision for Carolina. I think that’s how we’ve run so far and how we’ve been successful, and how we’ll continue to be successful as an administration is to have people believe the policies that we set forth.

DTH: What are you looking forward to?

EA: The thing I’m most excited for is probably just being able to unify our student body. We went through a very rough election cycle, it was very divisive and it turned a lot of people off from student government, and I think before this people were very apathetic to student government in general, and that is something I wanted to work on in the beginning ... improving transparency with student government. 

But after this election cycle it’s something I want to work even harder for. I think gaining the trusts of the students back and then taking it that step further and show them we are truly here to work for them and better their Carolina experience.

DTH: What are your top priorities?

EA: Right now, first and foremost, getting a team together so we can be a fully functioning administration, but after that I think the main things I wanna focus on are priorities that were set forth in our platform — being sexual assault, mental health awareness and this idea of diversity inclusion. And those are the things we built our campaign on and those are the things we’d like to tackle in our administration.

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