Lydia Phelps, a third-year student in agriculture business, will serve as the Undergraduate Student Government president for the 2025-26 school year. 

“It feels amazing, honestly,” Phelps told the Daily Egyptian on Thursday. “It’s nice to know that not only did my team believe in me – because obviously they spent the last 10 days campaigning with me – but it’s nice to see that campus also felt like we really understood who they are and what they need enough to trust us with the whole year.” 

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Phelps ran against Phillip Hartke, a third-year student in engineering who served as USG president during the 2023-24 school year. Voting opened at 6 a.m. on D2L April 8 and closed at 4 p.m. on April 9. The results were announced at 4:30 that evening in the Student Center. 

Phelps, who plans to go to law school after graduating next May, ran for president with a message of lifting people and leading progress. During her campaign, she highlighted three primary platform points: streamlining the USG funding process, expanding her late-night food truck program and continuing renovations for the fourth floor of the student center. 

She said her first step as president will be focusing on simplifying the funding process for registered student organizations (RSOs), which she and her team plan to work on over the summer.

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“Our internal document is 35 pages. While that internal document is necessary for the Senate and the funding board, it’s very convoluted and honestly kind of confusing to RSOs,” she said. “So we’d like to condense it down to a one-page outline of the entire process (including) what the RSOs can expect from the very beginning of the process all the way through if they decide to appeal.” 

She said her team is also going to work on creating a second document that operates like a rubric, ensuring that funding is distributed based on the merit of the request, rather than what a group is given traditionally. 

“Each category that we can allocate money for, we’d like to break that down into the expectations, what we’re grading off of basically, and then how we’re evaluating that request, so students and RSOs have a better understanding of what that will look like and what they can expect,” she said. “So it’s probably the first thing we’ll work on, and we hope to have that completely nailed down before we come back,” she said. 

Phelps served in USG as a senator-at-large for the past two years. She is involved in several organizations throughout campus, including Sigma Alpha Sorority, Ag Council Executive Board and the SIU Writing Center. She said her favorite part about SIU as a whole is the atmosphere. She said she likes to visit SIU’s Thompson Woods and the nearby Shawnee National Forest, and she also speaks highly of the university’s students and administration. 

“This entire campus was participating, communicating, advocating for 10 days straight for what they thought was important, who they thought would represent them adequately,” she said. “And seeing that community and just that absolute outreach — that creates such an amazing atmosphere and it’s nice to know that while it was just those 10 days that they were doing this, students do this year round.” 

One thing she thinks SIU could improve on, however, is resource availability, which she spoke about throughout her campaign week. 

“If we’re gonna touch on retention and enrollment, that has to be the first thing we improve upon,” she said. “Again, the prime example for this is aviation – working on getting more of their planes available and more resources out there just simply available to students, is not necessarily something that SIU does poorly on, it’s just something that we can maybe improve upon. So working on that is gonna be at the forefront of our entire year really.” 

Joining Phelps on the USG executive board is Cameron McCullough as executive VP, Abby Tate as VP of student affairs, Alex Baughman as chief of staff and Nadia Ogiela as VP of finance. 

Going into this term as president, Phelps said that she wants the student body to know she has a lot of gratitude for them. 

“I think it’s really easy for me to say thank you on social media and students maybe not fully understand that, but I am so grateful to be here, to be on this campus, to have the opportunity to get an education here at Southern, but I’m even more grateful to have their support and to have their trust,” she said. 

News editor Carly Gist can be reached at cgist@dailyegyptian.com. To stay up to date on all your southern Illinois news, be sure to follow The Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Instagram @dailyegyptian.

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