Leadership Lessons: An Interview with Akilah’s Student Body President

Student governance is an integral part of campus life at Akilah. After months of campaigning, a new Student Cabinet was elected and sworn in on March 11th.

Three months after her inauguration, we caught up with the new Guild President, Sonia Rugwiro, for an update on her new role as a leader.

What is your main function?

I’m managing the cabinet of 16 members and representing the student body. Students should feel free to come to me with anything on their mind, and I’ll support them and ultimately be the one to make decisions on the next steps to solve the issue.

I want to find out what needs to be improved in the students’ lives on campus — and how to do it.

People are coming to me a lot. It’s keeping me quite busy and I’m having lot of meetings. It’s a lot of work, but I’m really enjoying it. [My cabinet and I] want to implement the promises we made during the campaign.

Why did you decide to run for president?

I wanted to help my fellow students by identifying problems around campus and coming up with solutions. At first, I thought I wanted to run for a Minister post, but as we got started with the campaign, I decided I wanted to exercise my leadership skills even further and run for president. There are a lot of different areas that I want to improve around campus: finance, entertainment, academic achievements, and student involvement. As the president I can be involved in all of these topics, while being a Minister requires focusing on a specific area and focusing the impact you have.

What are your biggest goals for your time as president?

We have made a promise to introduce student-led meetings. We want to be able to discuss student affairs on campus without relying on administrative staff to facilitate us.

We are also planning to be awarding students who do particularly well in different areas of campus life — not just academically but also in terms of leadership, communication skills and so on.

We also want to strengthen our clubs and the different activities we do outside of class. We want to encourage people to participate more in campus life. We are planning to make a wall of fame for students — acknowledgement of their hard work and accomplishments and invoke a sense of pride.

Our overall efforts are going to revolve a lot around academics. A lot of students struggle with exams and some will need to retake them if they don’t perform well. We want to create tutoring groups to help the ones who are struggling and support them to improve academically.

What makes you passionate about student politics?

I love it because because I can be part of making changes happen. I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait for others to act — I’d rather take action myself.

I’m gaining experience in leadership — being a leader is not a simple thing. We study leadership at Akilah, and this is an amazing opportunity for me to try practice my leadership skills in real life.

How do you plan to use these skills in your professional career?

I’ll definitely bring these experiences with me to my future job. Maybe I’ll be in a company where they need someone to step up and be a leader. I won’t wait for someone to nominate me — I’ll take the initiative.

I get to lead so many different people and to know many different personalities. It teaches me to handle different situations, because I need to be able to make quick and effective decisions. You need to act immediately — and that skill will definitely help me in my future career.

Burundian students celebrating at the Swearing-in of the Student Guild

What is the biggest challenge you face as students?

Academics are challenging. The system of having exams and having to retake them before you can graduate makes students stressed. It’s hard for students to focus on an exam while thinking about that they might not graduate if they fail it. It creates a lot of pressure.

We need more tutoring to help students who struggle. That’s how we need to approach the problem. Encourage the girls to study more, improve their grades and worry less.

What are you future career dreams?

I currently study Information Systems, and when I finish I want to work in one of the big network companies — we don’t have many here in Rwanda, but I hope to find a good one after I graduate. I love technical networking, there are a lot of programming and design challenges that come with it. And I think it will be a good chance for me to practice my leadership skills too.