Carnegie Mellon University Study Body President Alexis Ozimok ran for office to help make sure that student voices were being heard. Since taking office alongside Vice President Catherine Taipe, she has helped reshape campus through communicating and collaborating with other student organizations and administration.
"With the work and initiatives we've done, student life feels better," said Ozimok, a senior studying international relations and politics.
Ozimuk said that in the four years she's been at CMU, she has seen the student body become more engaged.
"I'd like to think that we left this place a little bit better than when we found it," she said.
Ozimok's work in politics goes beyond CMU. As a regional fellow for NextGen America, a nonprofit that mobilizes young voters, she helps conduct voter outreach and generates social media content related to voting, and she has interned for local and congressional campaigns.
Undergraduate women at CMU like Ozimok are working to impact local and national politics. While Millennials and Generation Z represented the largest share of eligible voters in 2020, college students often have low voting rates, according to the Pew Research Center.
"Historically, the voices of college students are not necessarily represented in legislation so the only way to really get change is by getting directly involved," Ozimok said. "You can really find an outlet in politics and government for anything you're passionate about ... It creates a really cool intersection of all these different fields of study and work in a way that you can directly engage with them."