Minnesota Student Association elections begin April 11, which means that Emily Serafy Cox, current MSA president will be out of office on July 1. Freshly home from an International Women’s Student Leadership Conference in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, she sits down with The Wake to discuss her term, her future and politics at the U.

Cox’s first words as MSA president-elect were “You’re shitting me.” She received a phone call from Margaret Cahill while riding her bike. Cox thought she had lost the race when Cahill told her, “Thanks for running a great campaign.” But then Cahill started to read off the numbers. “It took me a second to realize my numbers were bigger than everyone else’s,” she says. “I was incredibly happy. I think it was a mixture of excitement and fear and disbelief as well as a feeling like, ‘Wow I did that.’”

“It’s a full-time job,” Cox, a half-time student says. “For me it has worked pretty well.” She adds that most MSA presidents have been full-time students, while she has only had to take six credits per semester to graduate on time. The job pays a stipend of $5,000 per year. “I worked it out to something like $3 per hour,” she jokes.

As president, Cox has been concentrating on “the relationship between both student government as well as students in general to the administration and the various levels of government,” she says. She is the “spokesperson of the student government to … administration and government and often to the press. And as that spokesperson, if the organization has taken a stance on something, [I] voice that stance,” she says. Plus, “there are a million things,” she says of her various duties.

Cox’s second in command is Vice President Colin Schwensohn, who also graduates in May. They met when Schwensohn was a senator on Cox’s committee for the student solidarity work she did with the AFSME Union strike two and a half years ago. “Our priorities were very similar and he seemed like somebody I could work with,” she says. “He’s been very brave,” Cox says of his ability to present issues in forum. “For him to get up there and field questions [during forum] … it’s not easy to do,” she says. “It can be intimidating and he hasn’t been intimidated by the task.”

MSA holds open forum meetings every other week and has committee meetings on non-forum weeks. “In weekly executive board meetings, we discuss projects and discuss agenda for forum or any problems arising,” she says.

Cox is working on her current mission is the Rental Housing Summit with the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly’s president Karen Buhr, with whom Cox traveled to Abu Dhabi. One session,held March 27, discussed building stronger communities and livable communities around campus. “There have been a lot of livability issues that have arisen from the interaction between student residents and permanent residents,” she says. The upcoming session on April 10 discusses both tenant and community grievances against landlords. “We want to find solutions and really address how we can move on from here,” she says, adding that making better housing around the university is the summit’s main objective. The session will be in Coffman Union in the President’s Room and is an open forum. “If the housing summit can get pulled off, it’ll be one of the biggest things that the student body presidents have done together since GAPSA and MSA split,” she says.

As for her thoughts on the year, “You never get as much done as you wanted to, no matter what you’re doing,” she says. “I didn’t have time to make as many of the changes and put as much effort into continuing things as I wanted to.” Even though she didn’t get to everything on her list, she says, “I hope that I have had a positive impact on the way things are run.”

Though Cox graduates in May and is “applying for jobs and internships,” she “would love to stay in Minneapolis,” she says. She would like to do non-profit work or governmental work in the service aspect of government. “There are things that I want to continue [from her MSA work] like projects or policy initiatives,” she says. But “you never know if they are going to [continue] because obviously you don’t have control over what happens next year.”

As for this year’s candidates, Cox says she probably won’t be publicly endorsing anyone because the only people she knows who are running are a fellow executive board member and her roommate. “At the moment, I need to step back,” she says. “I’m definitely ready to move on to the next stage of my life.”

For more information about what MSA is up to, visit .