A day in the Life of three-term SGA Vice President Greg Felock

Student Government Association Vice President Greg Felock hurried in to the University Center as President Benny Dorris told him that the copier jammed when others tried to make 50 copies of the SGA agenda. Felock darted toward the copier without hesitation to fix the problem.

In the past hour, Felock had rushed from an SGA Executive Board meeting to introducing Nicholas Sparks at the Show Me Center and then back to the Center for Student Involvement in the University Center, leaving his job of organizing the SGA senate meeting to Dorris.

While Felock cleared the paper jam, loaded paper into the copier and started making more copies, Dorris joked that whenever Felock couldn't be there to set up the senate meetings, they should just be canceled.

Felock is the only three-term vice president in the history of SGA at Southeast Missouri State University and has ran senate meetings and been an influential voice for Southeast students since he was a sophomore.

"Whenever you are new, like when I first took over this position, there were some rough days," Felock said. "Things like this would happen, and the position just overall was really stressful. So now, it is all easy."

Within the matter of minutes, Felock had gone from speaking to a millionaire author to fixing a copier.

"That's about my life," Felock said.

Felock's final term in SGA is winding down. He will graduate in May and plans to go on to medical school. On Monday, March 10, the Arrow followed him for an entire day.

Felock's day began with a drive back from his home in St. Louis before heading straight toward his office in the Center of Student Involvement at the University Center, where he wrote the SGA senate agenda before going to his 12 p.m. class.

"Usually I don't do that until more of the afternoon or evening, but because of budget review and Nicholas Sparks, I'm missing a lot of time that I usually have," Felock said. "So I came up and made the entire agenda."

As vice president, Felock is the chair of the SGA senate and has to organize and run its meetings every Monday at 8 p.m. The week's agenda included funding resolutions, student organizations to be recognized and the approval of the revised Student Activities Council constitution.

"This is never actually finished until after [the SGA Executive Board meeting] because exec is when we look at the discretionary requests and approve amounts for that," Felock said. "So after exec is when I fill in the final numbers, print it out and make usually about 50 copies for the room."

While in his office, he got an email including his speech to introduce Sparks as part of the University Speaker Series. Felock characterized it as a "pretty normal morning," before heading over to his only class of the day, Intro to Evolutionary Biology, at noon.

During the class, Dr. Michael Taylor talked about how there can be no one definition for what a species is because our biological landscape is too diverse to be able to accurately narrow it down. He then went on to talk about how new species can evolve and ended his lecture by explaining how to interpret Phylogenetic trees that show the correlations of descendant and parent species.

"Its basically your basic, run-of-the-mill Intro to Evolutionary Biology," Felock said. "For me, it is a biology elective. It doesn't really relate to exactly what I want to do or the next step in my life, but it fills an upper-division biology credit."

Felock is a pre-med student majoring in biomedical sciences with minors in both chemistry and Spanish. He has yet to decide where he is going to medical school, but he plans to study pediatric oncology.

After the class ended at 1:15 p.m., Felock checked in with Dr. Walt Lilly, with whom he does fungal biochemistry research, to see if a new compound came in for protein analysis tests for the next day. He then stopped by his room in the Lambda Chi Alpha house, grabbed dress clothes to change into, got gas and a soda from Rhodes and got to the University Center for work by 2 p.m.

Felock has worked as a student assistant in UC 202, Campus Life and Event Services, since January. On Monday, he worked from 2-3:30 p.m., but he is scheduled to work 11 hours a week.

"Right now I am going through all the old Greek Life files and scanning them through and consolidating them onto an electronic copy so we can get through all the old paper copies and make space and clean up a little bit," Felock said.

Along with making electronic copies, Felock has also put some key information into spreadsheets.

"I think the earliest I've seen is like 1987 and they go up to about 2010-ish," Felock said. "It's everything from grades to housing contracts to judicial stuff, just anything and everything. I'm just making sure that if we are throwing it away, that we have it on file if it is important enough to keep and have record of. Then we will probably hand this off to Greek Life when I'm done with it so that it's all in one place because right now we have Greek Life stuff in three different offices, and we are trying to put it together into one."

This day, Felock was looking at Pi Kappa Alpha records from the 1991-1992 school year. He found that they used to lease the Greek housing to chapters, instead of just having members pay room and board.

"This is kind of like my ongoing project for when I don't have any other tasks to work on," Felock said. "Usually I answer the phone and do what is at hand for whatever project we are working on. Sometimes it is hanging up fliers or making a poster. It is something different every day, but when there is downtime, this is what I am doing. Just slowly going through the mountain of files we have back there and scan them through, then recycle them. I'm never bored. I'm always doing something."

Felock left right at 3:30 p.m. to go upstairs to the budget review meeting, which started at the same time.

"Budget review is the process by which our university sets the budget each year," Felock said. "We look at what it would take just to make the university run continuously, as is now. Then we take any additional money and allocate that out to any improvements, whether it's new staffing, different positions, different scholarships and a lot of different stuff."

The members on the committee include representatives from various departments across campus, including student government. Yet Felock, along with Dorris and SGA treasurer Nick Maddock, are the only students on the committee.

"Today what we actually did in budget review is look at different requests from every division, and student government is one that is allowed to come forth with different requests for different things," Felock said. "So we looked at those today, and we will vote on those later on when we actually balance a budget."

After budget review ended at 5 p.m., Felock got food -- that he would never have time to eat -- from Papa Johns at the University Center, went downstairs to his office to change a few things on the senate meeting agenda and then went back upstairs to be at the executive board meeting by 5:30 p.m.

"One of the bigger things that we need to do is deal with the discretionary account," Felock said. "Kind of like how the funding board decides what we vote for in senate for student organization requests, we do the same thing with discretionary requests. Other than that, we deal with any other different type of issue. The meeting that we are having today, we are meeting with a couple of administrators, and it is still mostly funding things we are going to be talking about."

The executive board consists of Dorris, Felock and Maddock along with a series of appointed positions including a secretary, a chief of staff and three committee chairs.

"We were really, really short on time. We had a lot to cover in the hour and a half, so I don't think we got everything done," Felock said following the meeting. "We are actually meeting again on Wednesday to do some more funding stuff and will probably discuss a lot of other things, too."

During the meeting, the board heard a few discretionary requests, but the majority of the meeting involved a few administrators presenting some initiatives SGA could fund next year.

As soon as the meeting ended at 7 p.m., Felock had to drive over to the Show Me Center to introduce Sparks at 7:30 p.m.

"It's not the first time I've done this stuff. It's still always kind of weird actually speaking in front of a thousand or so people," Felock said. "I'm sure I'll get some butterflies before, but as far as [the speaker series], I introduced Michael J. Fox my first year and last year I did Michelle Kwan. I'm a little experienced, but it is still always kind of weird."

By 7:06 p.m., Felock was waiting outside of Sparks' green room in the hallway. Felock got a copy of his speech at 7:20 p.m., and then promptly at 7:30, Sparks came out of his room to go give his speech. After a few pleasantries with Sparks on the way to the stage, Felock gave his two-minute introduction and was on his way back to the UC by 7:36 p.m.

After fixing the copier when he got there, Felock sent Dorris upstairs with the agendas already printed and stayed to finish making copies for every senate member and visitors to the meeting. Felock noted that in the three years he has ran senate meetings, he could count the times they had to start late on one hand. So when he finished the copies and saw that it was 7:59 p.m., Felock ran up the stairs to make it to the senate meeting on time.

At senate, Felock started the meeting by proudly stating that he made it on time, which got some applause. He then continued down the agenda, keeping the meeting in order by calling on people to speak and moving discussions along.

"By far the worst thing about being vice president is that you are so attached to all of it," Felock said. "You've gotten everything together when you set the agendas. You are so intimately involved, but at the same time, once you get to senate, you are not allowed to have an opinion or really speak because you are the chair. You are kind of that objective third party, which just sucks sometimes."

At the meeting senators voted to fund various student organizations before discussing the various projects SGA had developed for the next school year, including Involvement Ambassadors, CTA Safe Ride and Southeast at a Glance.

"It was very productive," Felock said. "We hashed out a lot of different ideas that we have worked on for a long time and we have discussed all these different concepts in detail, but we have never really discussed how we are going to go about them in the future."

Felock ended the meeting with the pun of the week, "If there's a competition for the best mannequin, there would be stiff competition." Felock has read a pun every meeting since he first was vice president three years ago, saying "the lamer, the better."

After cleaning up the meeting room and talking with a few senate members, Felock took one last trip to his office before finally being able to go home at 10 p.m. at the end of a long day.