If Lindsay Richardson had followed her plans from senior year in high school, she wouldn’t be running for student body president right now. She wouldn’t be involved in Student Government.
She wouldn’t even be at USC.
Richardson wanted to go to college outside of South Carolina and try activities she hadn’t been a part of in high school. But after a tour of the campus, she knew USC was “home.”
“After we toured, I looked at my dad and told him, ‘You have to send that deposit,” Richardson said.
So she stayed in South Carolina and began her freshman year, moving into Sims College. That’s where her career in Student Government began.
Sims residents have to swipe their CarolinaCards twice in order to gain access to the residence hall — once at the front desk, and once at a second door beyond the initial entryway. One day, Richardson’s roommate was coming back to the building carrying a large basket of gifts. While trying to maneuver through the two-swipe system, she dropped the basket, breaking half the items inside. When she heard about her roommate’s incident, Richardson wanted to figure out how to make a change.
“I sat down in [the Sims residence life coordinator’s] office and said, ‘What can we do to change this?’” Richardson said. “She mentioned that hall government elections were coming up and suggested I run.”
Richardson did, and she won a seat in the Residence Hall Association senate. Soon after, she was named the organization’s liaison to Student Government, which prompted her to run for student senate the following spring.
“The rest is history,” Richardson said.
She rose quickly through the ranks of the senate, chairing the powers and responsibilities committee as a sophomore and being elected president pro tempore — the highest position a senator can hold in the body — a year ago.
In her time as president pro tempore, Richardson has been a leader in introducing legislation and beginning initiatives like the Carolina Closet, which will allow students to rent business attire for interviews if they don’t have their own. Like many of her projects, this idea came from her own personal experiences.
As a resident mentor in Patterson Hall, she had a resident come to her concerned about an upcoming interview. The resident didn’t have any professional clothes, and didn’t have enough money to afford them.
“Sometimes, you don’t realize these problems exist. You see this nice building and you assume everyone is from a similar background,” Richardson said. “But if there’s one person going through something, there’s probably more, and that’s when you need to do something about it.”
Now, she wants to take on the executive branch.
While the next step up from president pro tempore is vice president, Richardson said the presidency was “a better fit” for her upon a close examination of both positions.
“I was thinking about what I wanted to do next year, and I looked at both roles,” Richardson said.
“The more I thought about it and reflected on it, I realized I’m more of an ideas person.”
The presidency, which places a heavy emphasis on initiative development and implementation, is the ideal “ideas person” role, Richardson said.
And she has a lot of ideas. According to her campaign website, Richardson’s campaign is a robust one, with 25 planks under five headings. Before the site’s launch, there were more, she said, but she wanted to pare them down as to not overload potential voters with information.
As with her senate legislation, many of these planks came from Richardson’s life and experiences with friends. When she talks about pushing for affordable tuition rates, she mentions a friend who was forced to transfer because she could no longer afford to stay in South Carolina. When discussing the need for gender-neutral housing, she cited the experience of a friend who came out as gay to his roommate when he was a freshman, only to be constantly too afraid to return to his dorm room due to the roommate’s extremely negative reception of the news.
“It gets to me when I see people going through challenges,” Richardson said. “Things in my platform are based on things that have impacted me and those around me.”
While Richardson knew USC was the perfect place for her after that senior year tour, she doesn’t want to graduate without seeing it change and improve.
“I don’t want to leave the university in the same state when I’m gone,” Richardson said. “My dad taught me to never leave a place the same way you found it, but to leave it better. That’s what I want to do.”