The campaigns have ended, the votes are in and the Bradley student body has chosen its next president for the 2025-26 school year.
On Wednesday, it was announced that Al Cuizon, Jr., a junior political science major, will serve as student body president for the upcoming year.
Following his election, Cuizon, Jr. spoke with The Bradley Scout about the significance of serving in Student Senate and the impact he hopes to make on the Bradley community.
The following interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.
Q: As a transfer student reaching the end of your first year here, how do you feel the Bradley community has impacted you and vice versa?
Cuizon, Jr.: [Bradley’s community] has impacted me in a lot of different ways. Coming from a community college, the culture is different. I’m a huge community college advocate, but in my opinion, Bradley University as a community is so intertwined with each other. It still needs some work in terms of communication gaps between different organizations and interest groups on campus, but when it comes down to it, when you go to community college, a majority of the time, you just go to class and leave. It’s like another senior year of high school. There are like 10% of students who want to commit and be involved on a community college campus. But at Bradley, that is enhanced tenfold.
Q: What initially inspired you to run for student body president?
Cuizon, Jr.: Honestly, I wasn’t even planning on running for president. I was planning on running for speaker of assembly. Adalia Yeung, the current student body president, was urging me to be speaker because, if you can’t tell, I like to talk. I also like to advocate for different things, and I have connections all over the city that are intertwined with Bradley, so it would make sense for me to be speaker. But a friend of mine, now my director of administration, Ryan Dodd, came up to me after a senate meeting and asked if I was considering running for president. We decided it would be best for me to run as president and for him to run as director of administration based on our talents and experiences, and we built our ticket from there.
Besides the political aspect of running for student body president, for me, it’s really about changing the stigmas of what student senate is and being able to relay what it should be. We ought to represent the ideas and collaborative perspectives from each and every one of the students on campus. Student Senate is the bridge between the student body and the university administration.
Q: What is your strategy to alter the stigma surrounding what Student Senate is?
First, simplifying what it means to be on Student Senate. Yes, you have to come to meetings, but we want to change the perspective of it being a chore to it being more of a passion. Obviously, it takes work, but the reason I’m so passionate about the senate and my ticket is because we have the ability to represent everyone and connect with the people.
Second is expanding the number of students in the senate. If we can expand and incorporate some relevant quality engagement initiative for each of the senators, we can show that being on the senate is about providing quality engagement and impact to the rest of the student body.
Q: What skills are you bringing from past experiences as you step into this leadership role?
Cuizon, Jr.: A lot of different clubs and organizations throughout high school and college have given me leadership experience, and being able to advocate for students within those clubs and organizations was what made me feel confident in becoming student body president here.
Listening is a big skill. The majority of leadership, in general, is listening to the different perspectives of students or stakeholders of any project you’re doing. Then, you have to be able to advocate for the same people you’re listening to, because if you just listen and don’t do anything, then what’s the point of you being in leadership? Finally, for me, I feel like it would be organization. You have to be organized in terms of initiatives and finding solutions to problems and identifying a project’s objectives and key results and how to accomplish them. Those are the three main skills I feel like I’ve learned within leadership.
Q: You just got the news that you won the election yesterday. What was your initial reaction, and how are you feeling now that you’ve had just a little bit of time to reflect and look forward to the year to come?
Cuizon, Jr.: I had a good feeling because my campaign team and I have done a lot of work. But in that initial moment, since I lost the last big election I ran back at ICC, it just felt unreal to me, because now, I have the opportunity to do what I’ve been saying I’ve been doing and do it for Bradley. Especially with the new university president coming into office, it’s a completely new era, and it’s exciting for me.
Q: What were the main promises of your campaign, and why should people believe that you will stay true to them now that you’ve been elected?
Cuizon, Jr.: The main problems I really focused on were, like I said, eliminating the stigma of what Student Senate is and adhering to my three pillars: innovation, collaboration and representation. I want to innovate through collaboration with each individual student, creating something new based on their unique ideas and perspectives to help enhance Bradley as a whole, and then represent everyone through those new collaborations and completely come full circle in that cycle of collaboration, innovation and representation.
I also just want to have a more community-based campus, and I have community connections here in Peoria that can help Bradley get to where we want to be as a quality educational institution. And I think it is, but there is so much room for improvement, especially after the enrollment decreases and the budget cuts from the previous years.
Q: What are the first few steps you’re planning to take as you enter the role or first initiatives you want to start working on? What are you going to hit the ground running with?
Cuizon, Jr.: One of the main things I want to hit the ground running with, in terms of initiatives themselves, is a new transparency policy and a liaison policy. Rumor has it, there are different counsels between each of the buildings here on campus. The Caterpillar Global Communications Center has its own council called the War Council, and here at the BECC, we have DSAC, the dean’s student advisory committee.
If every college has one of those, why not have them be a part of the the overall centralized Student Senate conversations and close the gap between what is truly being communicated on a mass campus scale and talk with them about ideas they have to enhance, not just their own individual colleges, but how those ideas can innovate the university holistically.
Q: How do you plan to collaborate with the student body to foster a sense of community amongst different organizations and individuals on campus?
Cuizon, Jr.: This ties into the liaison policy I want to establish and focus on, my intention is to talk to a majority of organizations with an open mind and an open heart to bring them into the conversation. It starts with connecting with the students who feel like Student Senate has no power or who have no idea what Student Senate is truly about and changing those perspectives by going to events and having conversations with different students.
Q: Finally, what do you hope will be your lasting impact as student body president of Bradley University?
Cuizon, Jr.: I don’t want to be just some student body president recorded in the books. I want to be the student body president who sets a legacy of changing perspectives for the better. For me, it’s about extracting creativity to help impact the university and carrying that on to the next student body president. It’s carrying on a mentality of what it truly means to be in leadership.
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