As spring funding wraps up, I want to commend a member of Associated Student Government for a job well done. If we never praise our public servants, who would ever want the job?
To pick one name from the many deserving nominees I collected from current members of ASG, I want to commend Weinberg senior Meta Marshall for her service on Student Activities Finance Board.
“You don’t hear much about how hard SAFB account executives work, but everyone on my committee does, and especially Meta,” said Carson Kuo, ASG financial vice president and Education junior. “She is invaluable and her presence next year will be sorely missed.”
This spring alone, SAFB worked more than 70 hours in a week and a half reviewing funding applications. SAFB member and Weinberg senior Nick Kacprowski said Marshall always went the extra mile. He remembered one meeting when SAFB found a discrepancy between two different budgeting figures. It was midnight on a Saturday.
“Everyone in the room looked around as if to ask, ‘Who’s going to fix this?'” Kacprowski recalled. “Then Meta said, ‘I’ll go back and look through everything’ She went back (that night) through a hundred pages of spreadsheets with a calculator and checked every single figure. I thought that was going above and beyond the call of duty.”
Marshall represented Joel Richlin, Arts Alliance senator and Weinberg sophomore, who described her as, “In a word, fabulous. She made personal house calls to come by my dorm room and go over the funding application with me. She helped us clean up the application proposal so it was a much more solid proposal, (increasing) the likelihood that they’d fund it overall.”
Working with Richlin, Marshall helped finance the upcoming 60th anniversary of the Dolphin Show.
“I was sitting in Senate and I was thinking, it’s a shame that she can’t be financial vice president because she’s a senior,” Richlin said.
Richlin had multiple regrets Marshall was a senior. “On top of all that, she’s hot and she’s single. ‘Meta Marshall is hot,’ that’s your quote for the top (of your column).”
I knew Marshall had done a good job when groups that SAFB had rebuffed acknowledged her professionalism. Noreen Khalid, Niteskool senator and Speech junior, strongly disagreed with SAFB’s recommendation to fund neither a CD nor a video for the group. She argued that SAFB did not recognize the number of Northwestern students who benefited from working on and viewing these products.
Still, Khalid said, “I think (Meta is) a very responsible account executive. I think she’s one of the most responsible account executives on SAFB.”
Marshall will work next year as actuary analyst for Watson Wyatt in the Loop. “Numbers are my thing anyway,” she said.
Asked why she committed the time as a senior, she said, “It definitely was difficult, but it was important. I decided it was a priority for me to be on SAFB sometime during college. … I could help groups out during the year to make sure funding problems didn’t happen.”
It’s worth taking a moment to say, the NU community is fortunate she did.
