Samia Abdulle
Samia Abdulle is a freshman studying political science and one of only two freshman committee directors in the Undergraduate Student Government. As the USG DEI committee director, she oversees projects within her committee and collaborates with other committee directors on cross-committee projects.
“I think I knew from a very young age that I wanted to pursue politics or legislation or anything within policy or something related to government. I decided to get involved with undergraduate student government because I was involved with student government throughout my high school — I was the president. And I wanted to continue my work within student advocacy. And I feel like I care more about local issues and university-wide issues more than a lot of state or federal issues. So I thought that being able to have an actual impact would be a lot easier at the university-wide level.
As a committee director, I oversee all the projects that we’re currently working on within the DEI committee, and I work with the other committee directors to see if there’s any cross-committee projects that we could work on. I’m also a staff member of USG, so I have to interact with all those people as well, which is the comms team and the executive team and stuff like that. Right now, my biggest project that I’m working on is the Global Gala. It’s this big fundraiser, charity event kind of thing, where we’re gonna have a bunch of student groups involved. There’ll be performances and tabling — just a really nice night of fun. It’s a lot of outreach for that so far, and just being able to stay on top of all of our projects. But a lot of our projects are working with an administration. The project that I’m currently spearheading is the hiring diversity project, where we reach out to different colleges, and we ask them what your hiring practices look like and if you’re hiring diverse faculty. We see the information that they give us and if there’s anything new that they can implement. So that’s one of the biggest projects that I’m working on right now.
Being first-gen has influenced a lot of my steps within USG and a lot of the projects that I’m a part of. I think it’s important to have my voice considered in a lot of the decision making throughout student government. Hopefully, somebody sees someone like me, who is a first-gen student and hopefully also looks like them, in a position like a committee director. Then they’ll want to pursue something like that.”
This interview had been edited for length and clarity.
Interview by Ben Wagner