Strolling around Tufts' academic quad on a college tour the summer before her senior year, something clicked for then-Mahopac, NY high school student Michele Shelton.
"Something just felt right - I was just like 'you know what, I need to be here.' I couldn't give you a concrete reason, it was just where I needed to be," said Shelton, who made Tufts her first choice when applying that fall.
Nearly four years later, the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate's no-nonsense treasurer has made another fateful decision - though not quite so spur-of-the-moment - and has thrown her hat in the ring in the TCU presidential campaign, now less than three weeks away. Standing behind a resume highlighted by her balancing the Senate budget for the first time in five years, Shelton delivers a familiar, populist message when discussing where she plans to take the Senate.
"The Senate should be about the students. The Senate should not play into the bickering over egos, and the Senate should not be about serving the elites on campus. It should be about reaching out to the general student population, and doing what the student population as a whole wants," she said.
The psychology major and political science minor won her way onto the Senate in a crowded, 23-person election during the first weeks of her freshman year. Working on the Services Committee and the Allocations Board (ALBO), the Senate's primary budgeting apparatus, at the end of her first semester, Shelton became known as someone to watch.
Rising quickly, she joined the executive board her sophomore year as the assistant treasurer, and took over the treasury at the start of this academic year. Although known mainly as the one behind the money, Shelton has taken on other projects in her three terms as senator, her most prominent success being the transformation of Hotung Caf?© into a late-night, sport-themed hangout.
While not one to demand the spotlight for her successes, Shelton has nonetheless been one of the few prominent figures on this year's quieter Senate, along with Senate President Dave Moon and her only declared opponent, Vice President Eric Greenberg.
"I'm not here to be quoted every day. If I was, I wouldn't be getting any work done," she said.
And believe it or not, she loves her work. Shelton talks of treasury number-crunching like it's the most fun she's ever had, from dealing with frustrated signatories to tweaking bank accounts and trimming budgets. The TCU treasurer says it's this experience that will give her the edge over Greenberg on April 25.
"Ideologically, I think we have similar goals for the Senate," Shelton said. "The difference is in terms of our leadership styles. In the Treasury, I've met someone from every single student organization on campus, just by the nature of what I do. I think I really have that connection with the student body, not just with the elites of the student body. I've heard so many issues, and people know that they can come and talk to me."
It's easy to see Shelton's meticulous, money-minded approach at work in her campaign goals, which include revamping student-faculty committees, pushing the administration to make progress on the construction of a new music building, and working with the Office of Residential Life to make its operations more student-friendly.
Shelton sees student-faculty committees, which normally feature three or four students working in conjunction with six to ten administrators and faculty members, as an area where the student body stands to gain tremendous power - if it fights for it.
"These committees have the potential to be really important, and they could make policy on this campus," she said. "The fact is that students aren't equally represented on these committees, and some committees don't even let students vote.
"I think it'll be a struggle getting it past the faculty, but it's a big step and it's one of my most important goals."
She also plans to pressure administrators to get the music building completed as soon as possible, in order to alleviate what she sees as a dearth of available performing and storage space.
"From the treasury side, I see so many performance groups struggling for space, struggling for equipment space, struggling for performance spaces. For one group we just heard a buffer funding request to rent out the Somerville Theater because all the on-campus theaters are filled up."
Shelton is also pushing a diversity agenda, hoping to retool Tufts' Freshmen Orientation programming to feature much more diversity education.
"That's the time to get students thinking about diversity on this campus. With the 11 hate crimes we had last semester, that's definitely the time to do that, and we've only got one program, 'Many Voices, One Community,' that talks about diversity."
Shelton also hopes to promote diversity and acceptance of minorities through her strong support of the two TCU Constitutional amendments on the April 25 ballot. The first amendment, adding one's self-acceptance of identity to the Senate's nondiscrimination policy, figures to engender little controversy. The second amendment would give the Senate's four culture representatives, who currently only observe and work on internal projects, full voting rights as senators. A similar amendment was voted down by a narrow margin when first proposed five years ago.
"People argue against the culture reps voting because it's double representation. But if you think about it, everyone on Senate is doubly representing someone. I'm doubly representing women by being a girl on Senate. I'm definitely for [it]. I think that more input is better than less input, and to me this is just adding more voices," Shelton argued.
If Greenberg and Shelton are re-elected in the April 11 general election as representatives of the class of 2002, both will need to be nominated by their fellow senators to begin their official campaigns. The two will then meet for an official presidential debate before the campus-wide election on April 25.
