[media-credit name=’Taylor Hughes’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]College students are often told they hold a lot of power.

They have the energy, the enthusiasm and the ideas to change things. They hold the keys to tomorrow and can send the world in any direction they choose.

But many young people don’t feel powerful, particularly on campus. Too many times, they feel constrained by the university bureaucracy or by regulated college norms that can pigeonhole students into feeling as though they are powerless to control the shape of their time at the University of Wisconsin.

But there are students on campus who have taken matters into their own hands.

By joining influential organizations and getting involved in leadership roles, a number of students have devoted their time to shaping the face of student life in Madison. And in the process, they have asserted themselves as some of the most powerful students on campus.

Yet of all student leaders at UW, none ranks more powerful or influential than student Regent Beth Richlen. As the sole student voice on the UW System Board of Regents, Richlen acts as perhaps the most pivotal advocate of student issues on a body determining the fate of the entire UW System.

Most difficult, and perhaps important, of the decisions made by the Regents are those concerning tuition hikes resulting from the current state budget crisis.

“It’s difficult to make decisions about tuition at all,” Richlen said. “You feel pulled in a million directions. You are a student, but you know the [budget] situation.”

Richlen said her position on tuition hikes (she voted against the 37 percent increase two years ago but voted for the 4 percent hike planned for the next two years) has earned her criticism by both students and her fellow regents.

“It’s a lot more difficult to be the student regent than any other [regent] because you have to walk thorough the campus every day,” Richlen said, adding that being confronted by students angered by the steadily rising tuition is difficult.

On the flip side, Richlen said others on the board often don’t take her pleas to keep tuition down seriously because they think she is biased by students’ innate interest in keeping prices low.

“Some regents feel like I have a constituency,” Richlen said.

But Richlen said she has chosen to ignore much of the criticism by simply putting students first as her priority, a decision she thinks every regent should make.

“If you just focus on the students, everything should fall into place,” she said. “If you work for the betterment of the students, you work for the betterment of the state.”

And in the end, devoting herself to the needs of her fellow students is the motivation behind accepting such a difficult, though exceedingly powerful, leadership position.

“It’s a really rewarding job,” Richlen said. “It’s really, really difficult, but it is definitely not thankless.”

**Emily Williams, ASM chair**

Though she is the mouthpiece of the entire UW student body, Emily McWilliams says it is the personal, individual contact she gets with students that matters most — and is most influential at the end of the day.

“My personal passion lies in working at the grassroots level,” McWilliams said. “I do not look at myself as just a chair.”

McWilliams, who previously worked at the Campus Women’s Center organizing events like “The Vagina Monologues” and a campaign against sexual assaults in university housing, said the pull of working with people at an individual level is the very reason she ran for chair of Associated Students of Madison. Knowing she can help students address campus problems is what she identifies as the most rewarding part of her powerful position.

“It’s heartening really,” she said. “It’s great to know that if they are going to raise … my tuition, I’m not helpless. But I think a lot of students think they are helpless.”

McWilliams said the students’ common feeling of powerlessness in the face of the university is a huge problem.

“I think the worst thing in the world is being a young person on campus and feeling like you don’t know how to fix the issues you care about,” McWilliams said, adding ASM is intended to empower students to address problems they see around them.

McWilliams does concede student government on campus has a reputation for being ineffective, and that the bad rap is in part true — mostly due to poor communication between student representatives and the campus at large. But she claims the vast array of student resources and ASM campaigns prove student government is an important force on campus.

“It’s definitely a two way street,” McWilliams said. “ASM is just as important as the 41,000 students on campus [are].”

**Janell Wise, SSFC chair**

Student Services Finance Committee chair Janell Wise admits her job carries a lot of influence because of the simple fact that with money, comes power.

“A lot of people see money as power,” Wise, a University of Wisconsin junior, said. “And we have the nay or yeah decision on that.”

Deciding how much of student-segregated fees organizations on campus receive for their yearly budgets often gives SSFC the authority to decide make-or-break decisions concerning the fate of campus groups at UW.

Wise, however, says SSFC’s power is not just about budgetary issues. Sometimes, it can lie more in determining which groups or initiatives merit more resources than others.

“It’s not just about the money part,” she said. “[I]t’s deciding about the direction student life will go.”

Wise freely admits being chair of the body is not an easy job. Although she makes no direct budgetary decisions, except in the case of tie votes, Wise is in charge of running long meetings, educating herself and others about how organizations spend their money, and leading a 15-member budgetary body in determining answers to complex fiscal questions.

But Wise said the biggest challenge of all is balancing the tension between two conflicting constituencies: administrators who want lower student fees in light of new tuition hikes and student groups asking for more money to fund their campus services.

“It’s hard to be a student and sit at a table and have your peers come to you asking for a service, and you have to say no,” Wise said.

Despite the headache of leading a group that is often pulled in multiple directions at once, Wise said the influence SSFC has to both improve UW and empower students makes the job well worth it.

“Hopefully when I leave the university, I will leave it better than I found it,” Wise said. “I think affecting the lives of 40,000 people is rewarding.”

**Roberto Paredes, MCSC executive staff member**

To Roberto Paredes, his influence on campus lies in the way he has learned to look for — and find — avenues of change.

“When I see something that needs to be changed, I always think there is a possibility [for it],” Paredes said.

As the senior executive staff member of the Multi-Cultural Student Coalition, Paredes has made it his goal to transform one of the largest and most powerful groups on campus to become more internally efficient in order to reach more students.

However, reworking MCSC has never been an end in-and-of-itself for Paredes; he hopes change inside the organization will bring about change outside — on the UW campus as a whole — as well.

In particular, Paredes has worked to alter many of the stereotypes students hold about MCSC, in particular the common perception the group is only welcome to students of color.

“Although that’s our primary target, [MCSC] is for everyone on campus,” Paredes said, adding the group is trying to take on a more inclusive, “open-minded attitude.”

“That’s the only way we can improve the overall campus climate — by reaching out to every student.”

And though he considers it a privilege to be a leader in the organization, Paredes also acknowledges it is sometimes difficult to defend MCSC when students criticize it based on popular misconceptions.

“I know a lot of people don’t understand the group. They see the budget, they read a couple articles here and there, and they think they know what the group is about,” he said.

After the university’s student government, MCSC receives the largest chunk of student fees, a budget that totaled over $440,000 last year. The group, which works to provide services and education on cultural and diversity issues, is one of the biggest organizations on campus, and also one of the most powerful.

Paredes points in particular to MCSC’s work in initiating Plan 2008, the university’s map for increasing campus diversity, as one of the positive marks the large group has made on campus. He says it was students in the group who first brought the issue of campus climate to the administration, claiming MCSC represents “the tree trunk” of Plan 2008.

But Paredes said traditional concepts of diversity are increasingly becoming not the sole focus of MCSC. The budget crisis that has touched every student and organization alike is also testing MCSC’s goal of increasing campus diversity, presenting a new and daunting challenge to the group.

“Tuition is pricing students out of school,” Paredes said. “It’s not just important to maintain diversity in terms of ethnic background, but also maintaining diversity in terms of socio-economic background.”

**Susan Edwards, New Voters Project student intern**

Helping register more than 8,000 students on campus thus far, well ahead of the New Voter’s Project goal for voter registration, gives Susan Edwards a sense of power because of the difference she thinks young people could make in the upcoming 2004 presidential election.

“[Y]oung people on this campus should feel so influential because we could be the swing vote that everyone keeps talking about,” she said, adding that since Gore won Wisconsin in 2000 by less than 6,000 votes, newly-registered voters on campus “could be the difference in the presidential election overall.”

Edwards, a student intern with the New Voter’s Project, was drawn into working for the non-partisan organization because of her desire to get students on campus more involved politically.

Edwards says the New Voter’s Project is a powerful force with young people because the often politically cynical college-student demographic is attracted to a group not affiliated with any particular party.

Indeed, Edwards recognizes the emphatic push on campus to get young people voting has made the New Voter’s Project, and her part in it, extremely influential this election cycle.

“I think our influence has been pretty amazing because the ubiquitous nature of voter registration on campus,” Edwards said.

Registering students to vote on library mall, handing out educational material about the election, holding “class raps” urging young people to go to the polls, and coordinating with the Associated Students of Madison’s Vote 2004 coalition has made Edwards a well-recognized figure on campus and put a face on the New Voters Project for many students.

However, Edwards says it is not her individual accomplishments and connections that make her feel like a powerful student on campus. Rather, it is the strides the voter registration effort is making as a whole that give her a feeling of real political efficacy.

“It’s been empowering to me that each step we have taken … has brought us closer to our goals,” Edwards said. “[It is] making politicians pay attention to us, making everyone pay attention to us.”