David Jones: [00:00:00] Hello, thanks for joining us for another Minnesota State University, family orientation podcast! I appreciate you listening for us a little bit more today; as a reminder I'm David Jones, I'm the Vice President for student affairs and enrollment management here at Minnesota State. Again, thrilled to be giving you updates and introducing you to some of the most interesting people here at the University, and the many things that they do to make us a cool special place.
So, I'm particularly excited about today's episode because we have our newest leader here at the University , we're joined by our new student government president. I'm going to let Rihanna do a full introduction of who she is here in a moment, but just to give everybody context, because I know we'll be talking about some COVID stuff.
Today is June 7th as we're recording this, every time we record one of these, we'll talk about what we know based on what the Governor and Minnesota Department of Health has released. So, it's all in context of today's date at this point. Enough about that, we'll talk more about that I'm sure, in due time as part of our conversation.
So Rihanna, thank you for joining us! Why don't you with our listeners here, share a little bit about who you are, your title, and what you're studying.
Rihanna: [00:01:13] Yeah! Well, thank you for having me, Dr. Jones, as you alluded to, my name is Rihanna Steph and I am the newly elected Student Body President.
So, I am actually a junior, but I'm entering my senior year, this fall, and I'm double majoring in Mass Media and Political Science. I have been involved with student government over the past two years, and then the opportunity came up this year, of course, to run for president and implement some of the things that are important to me and my Vice President Kara's pearson.
So I think it started excited to kind of see some of those plans come to fruition and hopefully help out a lot of students in the process.
David Jones: [00:01:51] Excellent, excellent! Now what'd you share folks, where are you from, where's home?
Rihanna: [00:01:56] I am from Illinois, actually in a very small town in Illinois called Mulberry Grove.
I think when people hear Illinois, they associate that with Chicago and Walmart. I do have a lot of family there and I was born there. I moved to the Southern portion of the state, I'm in the town of about 700 people so that's where I grew up.
David Jones: [00:02:16] Mankato itself , the niversity is bigger than your hometown.
Rihanna: [00:02:21] Yeah! I said in my my inauguration speech that I will be serving 14,000 students, and that my constituency is now of course, bigger than my entire town's population and the towns next to us combined. So, Mankato is definitely a jump in size from what I'm used to.
David Jones: [00:02:38] Right! So, the natural question is going to be how did you find us and why did you come here?
Rihanna: [00:02:44] Yeah! So, I have a sister who lives in the Twin Cities and she had been trying to get me to come to Minnesota for years, and I was like, well that sounds good, but I need to explore my options. I knew I did not want to stay in Illinois, I did want to see somewhere new, I want to try a different state.
I feel like in Illinois, your options are very rural where I'm from or Chicago, and I didn't necessarily want to be in either. Then my sister actually had my niece and that kind of sealed the deal for me, so I started touring schools in Minnesota. I went to a couple places St. Cloud. I went to the U and then I toured Minnesota State, which it felt like an actual college campus to me, that's kind of what separated it from the other schools. I didn't want to feel like I was just like roaming through the inner city; I wanted to feel connected. Like I can have a campus and I can have a campus community. I also didn't want something super small that reminded me too much of home.
So, coming here, the campus was beautiful. They had the program I wanted, which is political science originally, before I added on my second major. Then I saw the arena and I saw just the opportunity to get involved with different organizations, and I was like, okay, I can definitely see myself being here!
Luckily it ended up great as you guys can see!
David Jones: [00:03:58] Yeah, absolutely buddy! President, that's not too shabby to say the least, just awesome! So this past year with the pandemic has been different right? In so many different ways. So, how did you navigate this past year?
Rihanna: [00:04:12] So this past year, well I do like, I guess my own company, it has been very difficult getting used to your own company when you don't have a choice.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when all the departments of the school closed, you know, student workers are sent home. Students were sent home from their dorms, and so I actually lost my job on campus because I couldn't be inside the department. Luckily, an opportunity arose for me to become a tutor, doing zoom tutoring.
So I got to combine 10 of my passions for, reading and writing and do that in a format that was safe for everyone. Over the summer, you know, adults still have to go to work. They still have to pay bills, and so my sister and her husband still had to do what they had to do to support their family.
So I ended up actually leaving my apartment in Mankato and staying in Minneapolis all summer 2020 to kind of help them with my niece, basically.
Then of course we had social justice movements, we had the death of George Floyd, and so all of this combined was kind of very taxing on myself and a lot of other students, but it was nice having the support of the University, having the University give us constant updates on what the plans were moving forward.
Then really just having University that took the pandemic and COVID seriously it implemented safety measures that could help students get back to normal life as we are about.
David Jones: [00:05:30] Yeah! Yeah, I would imagine. So, obviously when you're a college student, the key thing is taking classes. How did your classes switch and how were you able to manage that?
Rihanna: [00:05:42] Yeah. So, of course all of my classes went completely online. And because a lot of my classes are reading and writing focused , whereas we would do some of that work in class. Usually now you have to do all of it at home , you have to still give reports, you still have to write papers.
And, you know, instead of having the two days of the weekend, it kind of felt like an endless stream of school basically. So with that I really had to start making the schedule to really start planning things out when I'm going to incorporate time to focus on school, because whenever you're at home, It feels like school2.
So, luckily I had some really great professors who understood this and who are switching completely online themselves, but it was definitely a big transition g...