Photo Courtesy of Alexis Marking

“I worked with the honors college to start a voting initiative in my county in New York state, and I’m the current president of our pre-law fraternity on campus, Phi Alpha Delta. I’m also a political science major, and I’m applying to law school right now. So, voting is very important. I actually, over the summer, worked for a woman running to be our state senator in the 45th district of New York. And I was basically her campaign coordinator, and for a lot of the summer I was one of her only full-time employees, so I ended up doing a lot of things that 21-year-olds don’t usually get the opportunity to do, which was really cool. If I wasn’t already passionate [about politics and the law], that [experience] definitely opened me up to it. … We have a lot of younger people who are coming out and voting, and I am very happy to see that, but traditionally young people don’t vote because we don’t really feel like we’re personally affected quite yet. We’re usually still stuck in like the intermediate stage of adulthood, and we’re just trying to figure things out, and we’re like barely paying taxes, and we’re not really contributing much aside from like drinking a lot of coffee and doing our best to survive through our first job or college or whatever. But we have the freshest perspective on everything, because we grew up in the environment that we are in, and we are a direct product of that environment. So people who are 75 are stuck in the environment that they grew up in, and they’re a product of that, so they’ve become out of touch sometimes … and so if young people aren’t there to say, ‘No, this is actually what we want,’ then we end up having things happen. If not everybody steps forward and makes their voice heard, then the voices [become heard unequally], and things happen that wouldn’t have happened if everybody had had a say. Don’t just vote, make sure that you’re educated on who you’re voting for. But also, there are a lot of different rules with absentee ballots and mail-ins these days, especially from state-to-state, so before you vote please make sure that you are informed on what you need to do to make sure your vote counts.”