Sitting down with student leaders about the ins & outs of student organizations. This edition we interviewed Maya Clark, a junior public relations major from the University Programming Board
Q: I know UPB has their hands in a lot of things on campus and you have a lot of members. Do you want to explain what exactly UPB does?
Clark: UPB is the home for on campus entertainment that uses student activity fees to plan events for the student body. So we do things like homecoming, the movie series on Friday, we do Unplugged which is our open mic night, we do Mr. and Ms. GSU, we do the fall festival, so we do a lot of things.
We have a lot of different types of people. We all have one thing in common, that we want to advocate for the students, and we want to plan events and market them towards students but we still get people who are so different. We have people who are interested in being out in front of the students, but you also get a lot of people that want to work behind the scenes and do a lot of the event planning work.
Q: What was the hardest part of becoming president of an organization that has such a big presence on campus?
Clark: I really have to know everything that everybody else is doing. And people are always going to be like ‘what is this?’ or ‘how do I do this?’ Our organization is split up into committees, so even if it is something to do with a specific committee and the committee chair might be there or might not be there, people’s first thought is ‘oh ask Maya because Maya knows everything.’ So it’s really been an adjustment going from a general member to being president and having people expect me to always know the answer to everything.
Q: UPB is a university sponsored organization. Is it tough to run an organization that has certain protocols they have to follow?
Clark: It is kind of difficult because sometimes we come with ideas and are like ‘we want to do this, this and this’ and then we have to remember that we have a lot of procedures we have to follow, we have to get a lot of approval from people in the vice president’s office and they might not think it’s a great idea for the students. So a lot of times that is one of the hardest things about being university sponsored is there are a lot of processes you have to go through to actually get something done.
