For Senator • Voices of Change
My name is Gil Saligumba, a Liberal Arts student preparing to take a Healthcare course. I am currently enrolled for Spring 2021 for my third semester at BMCC. I am a consistent recipient of the Certificate of Merit for achieving the Dean’s List for the 2020 Spring and Fall semesters, and I am a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society of BMCC since 2020.
I started my journey at BMCC as a member of the Panther Partners and more than just being a BMCC program, joining Panther Partners was like finding a family, for it gave me a home as a first-generation student. As a new student in the midst of the very diverse school community of BMCC, it felt like I was always grabbing in the dark, but that changed thanks to the solicitous guidance of Ms. Rahana Belle-Jerome, the program specialist of Panther Partners, my ever- accessible mentor, Coach Dakota Olson, coordinator of Athletics of our BMCC Sports Department and Vice President Marva Craig’s regular emails of guidance, great care and concern for all the BMCC students.
By the Fall 2020 Semester, I became a member of the Urban Male Leadership Academy (UMLA) at BMCC, and with the generous support of Mr. Ashtian Holmes, the program director, I was ushered into a greater involvement and participation with the socio-economic issues affecting our school community, our families, and the people around us. Since 2020, many things have happened that each of us needs to process and overcome to pursue and remain focused on our online classes. These things include the rising death count for the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the long-standing problem of racial discrimination reawakened by the disturbing killing of George Floyd in South Minneapolis, which triggered street protest marches around the nation in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. To this date, racial discrimination continues to haunt those of us coming from minority races, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. We have been subjected to human atrocities that long inflicted us with pain, suffering, and death. Now we are standing our ground against anti-Asian hate crimes, racism, and calling for racial equity. And lately, with the presidential election, our people’s extraordinary polarization climaxed into the right-wing extremist’s violent riot of January 6 at the Capitol that rendered vulnerability of our American Democracy. Amidst all these chaotic series of events that unfolded before our very eyes, our determination to pursue our educational goals prevailed.
On my part, a beautiful thing I realized that happened during this pandemic and had helped me remain focused on with my online courses, is the nurturing relationship and good rapport I found with almost all my teachers. Indeed, cultivating a healthy student-teacher relationship and establishing good rapport is essential to realizing any endeavor at this challenging period. And this is the underlying philosophy for my desire to run for a Senator position in the Student Government Association of BMCC.
With the vaccinations taking place, our eyes are looking forward to the silver lining of our hope for our long-awaited time when things can go back to normalcy as it was before, where we can gather together again in our school campus we have been missing for a long time where I hope to serve as a Senator at the Student Government Association, with your support and vote for the SGA 2021 Election. As I felt the need and the importance of developing a nurturing support system among teachers and students, I would like to represent and become the voice of every student aspiring to succeed and finish his, her or their courses with a nurtured sense of self and happy inter-personal relationships. And as a person of color myself, I would like to represent and become the voice for the students of Asian and Pacific Islander descents, and students coming from other minority races.
