Introducing the New Student Body Senate Executive Team

President Alondra Loza and Vice President Orion Pendragon Share Their Hopes for the Semester

Quest writer Abby Durrant sat down with Student Body President Alondra Loza to discuss her position as Student Body President. Loza is a junior Sociology major with a Spanish minor and uses she/her pronouns.

Can you talk a little about your experience with Senate before becoming Student Body President?

Before becoming president, I ran for Senate primarily to do work on the HUM 110 curriculum and with the goal of making information about Reed (specifically what the admin/trustees/President's office does) more accessible to students. It was really frustrating being a first year student, and also a first generation college student, not knowing anything about how colleges work and where my tuition money was going. I became really invested in both optimizing mine and other students' resources available at Reed, because there really are quite a lot, it's just hidden in a very confusing way [as] the website is pretty hard to navigate. Most of what people know about how things work is word of mouth which is fine sometimes, but something I hear quite a lot of complaints about is Reed's lack of institutional memory … I definitely want to help make [that] better this year through my Senate work. Making HUM 110 comfortable and educational for students was something I was really interested in, especially in regards to second semester [content]. Before becoming a Senator I was one of the original members of the Student Committee of Diversity (SCOD) and together with the chair, Apoorva Mangipudi ‘21, we drafted the first version of the HUM 110 Student Consultant Program. It was extremely rough around the edges, but we proposed it to the Center for Teaching and Learning at the end of my sophomore year, and it was kinda in limbo for a bit. Very fortunately, Cami West from the Office of Institutional Diversity picked it up, and this summer Safi Zenger (App Comm Chair), Josh Cox (staff member), and I all worked on creating the guidebooks for the pilot program that's having it's first year now! [That] is really exciting.

What are some of your goals for Senate this year? 

In terms of president platform/stuff that I'm working with Orion on, we're really trying to fix a lot of the problems that COVID left. We want to help maintain the history and legacy of student involvement and organizations that could have been lost during COVID, as well as make student work and policy committees more transparent. In layman’s terms, every student has the right to know what’s going on in their school and with their money.

What are you most excited for this year? 

I'm honestly really excited to be seeing bits of Reed lore coming back, obviously, as long as it stays safe and promotes a good environment for people to feel comfortable. It's very bittersweet to be an upperclassman joining in on traditions that I haven't gotten to see since I was a freshman. 

Durrant also sat down with Orion Pendragon to discuss their position as Student Body Vice President. Pendragon is a sophomore Anthropology major, uses they/them pronouns, and their favorite color is orange.

Can you talk a bit about your position as Student Body Vice President?

Student Body Vice President is a pretty fun position. I feel like it's the most flexible of all of the tenants. On paper, my job is the liaison between Treasury and Senate, and how that job [looks] is completely up to me. Because... Senate and Treasury are so close knit and community oriented, I don't really need to be the liaison. They already communicate. 

So I am really focusing on bringing transparency. I really want individuals at Reed who know absolutely nothing about Senate or Treasury or how it works to be able to go to signator training and start a club. I want them to be able to have the thought, have the idea, have a cool thing that they want to accomplish, and give them a way to do that. [I also want to] widen the scope of students that we reach. Because right now, that's sort of limited to people who read the entirety of SB info, or people who read the Quest, or people who know us. And so, as student body vice president, I really want to focus on just broadening that. 

What are you most excited about this year?

I am most excited for balls to come back. It's not really a very geeky thing. It should be really fun! I am also excited to see what everyone on Senate does. 

Quotes edited for clarity