Newly Elected ASWSUV President Lindsey Heather and Vice President Ognian Dintchev Discuss the Future of Student Government at WSUV

The ASWSUV 2026-27 school year election results are in. Among the new leadership are future ASWSUV President Lindsey Heather and Vice President Ognian Dintchev. Amongst their goals for their terms will be building on their connection with students, Windstead’s contributions to ASWSUV, as well as improving ASWSUV’s internal operations.

While speaking on the current state of ASWSUV, Dintchev cited improvements in communication with students and staff as well as an expansion of ASWSUV’s visibility amongst student conversations at orientations or general events.

“Over recent years, our relationship with the campus in terms of visibility and with higher administration has been heavily [improved]. We have strong connections with administration, whether it’s the Chancellor’s office, with people in the student centers or other departments,” Dintchev said.

Connecting this trend to future initiatives, Dintchev expressed excitement for increasing the scale of operations next year, whether that be in hosting larger events or more major improvement projects on campus.

One of the goals for President Heather is to build their connection with the student body. She noted that year over year the amount of people who show up to events is increasing, and that she intends to continue tracking sign ups in events in order to measure how ASWSUV is doing in that regard.

Furthermore, Heather said she wanted to push for better advertising to students on ASWSUV events, which will include creating more advertisements and planning events months in advance.

Heather also added that ASWSUV is planning to improve record keeping, as well as provide clearer instructions for newly elected representatives in order to smooth over the transition process between old and new representatives.

When asked about Jacob Windstead’s contributions to ASWSUV during the last two years of his presidency, Dintchev praised Windstead’s work behind the scenes with administration and other campuses in order to get more resources available on campus.

“I think his greatest contribution is his repairing of all our connections, and that gives us access and all these people to talk to and get help from and work with in order to improve things statewide, campus wide, systemwide,” Dintchev said.

When asked about the possibility of Heather and Dintchev serving two years in office like Winstead, the two expressed openness to the idea, but no definitive stance for the time being. Dintchev did highlight the value in following in Winstead’s footsteps, explaining that serving for more than a single year allows opportunities to create larger projects, with more time to see them through.

In closing, Dintchev gave his motto over recent months as the two prepare to step into their roles as President and Vice President. “The way that I’ve been saying it over these last few months is students complain and we complain louder,” He said. “That’s our role as ASWSUV is to relay student voices or even department voices or whoever, however, to improve campus. Our job, we work for the students here.”

Heather also gave closing comments, saying “Our job is to advocate for students and what they want and what could be better on campus. I want to always improve everyone’s quality of life on campus, to provide bigger and better resources as time goes on. The overreaching goal, I would say, is improving student life and advocating for what students want.

Lindsey Heather and Ognian Dintchev officially start their elected positions starting in Fall ‘26, where they will be joined by 11 newly elected Senators.