Jill Galanti, executive vice president (EVP) of the Undergraduate Student Association (USA) and a junior at Canisius College, wants to “give back to the undergraduate student population one last time” before she graduates next year.
Galanti decided to run for the position of EVP because she has been a part of the USA since she was a freshman, and she says she was always interested in working her way up to run for the position. When an opening for EVP became available between her sophomore and junior year, she decided it was the perfect opportunity and time for her to run — so she did.
Galanti started out in the USA as a first-year senator, then was a sophomore senator as well as the Public Safety liaison. Galanti said, “USA has been an extremely transformative experience for me during my time here at Canisius.” Galanti is not only the EVP of the USA, but she is also a member of the women’s D1 lacrosse team, an active member in several other clubs and a scholar in the classroom.
Through being involved with USA since the beginning of her college career, Galanti feels that she is a good fit for EVP because she “understands all of the processes and procedures that go into making the association function properly,” she said. “Additionally, I have context and experience of how the organization has been run in the past and now that I am the EVP, I have the ability to make positive changes with the help of my amazing fellow executive board members and senate as a whole.”
Galanti’s campaign while she was running for EVP was all about doing her job to the best of her ability and making the internal affairs within USA run much smoother in regards to operation and transparency. Even though Galanti oversees and offers advice to the individuals who are putting on events on campus and has taken on specific initiatives in this role, she feels as though it is “more important to be a helping hand and friendly face that they know they can count on and come talk to when they are experiencing successes and struggles and anything in between,” Galanti said.
The main goal that Galanti says she has always had, even before she had the role of EVP, is “bridging the gap between student-athletes and the rest of the undergraduate student population,” she explained. “Although I have been a three-year member of the women’s lacrosse team, coming into Canisius I knew that I would not settle for only having fellow student-athletes as friends. I had a mission to branch out and connect with as many people as possible from all different interests on campus and now, I feel like I have almost achieved this personal goal.”
Galanti said her top three core values are communication, hard work and respect, and she has found that in this role as EVP, empathy has also quickly become an additional value that relates to her leadership values as she is responsible for about 35 ambitious student leaders.
Galanti, as well as the rest of the executive board, decided from their first meeting over the summer that they were going to create a new culture within the senate that would inevitably trickle down to the lives of all undergraduate students.
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