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Student Government

5 things you don’t know about the SG presidential slates: Sarah Pollei and Antonio Morales

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Sarah Pollei, a junior majoring in biology, and Antonio Morales, a sophomore majoring in criminology, are running for student body president and vice president this spring. They have been campaigning and reaching out to the student body to gain recognition in hopes to be elected this week.

Their initiatives include three main pillars: connection, sustainability and inspiration.

They want to create a better connection with Student Government and the student body, push for a greener university by implementing more recycling bins around campus and inspire students to be bold in their actions and love the university.

Students may know these candidates because they are Residential Assistants (RAs) and were Orientation Team Leaders (OTLs) over the summer, which is how they met.

All of this information is helpful, but doesn’t really identify who Pollei and Morales truly are.

Below are 5 facts (each) about these candidates that you may not know about them.

Pollei

Pollei gets away from her busy schedule and meditates for about 30 minutes every day. “I usually like to do it before its evening when the suns about to come down,” she said, “and you feel more in tune with things because animals are more active at night and trees are happier at night.”  She usually does her breathing exercises alone, on top of parking garages, but sometimes invites people to share the experience. “If I don’t meditate, I am a burning stress ball,” she said.

She is interested in becoming a doctor in geriatrics/orthopedics, “because old people need bones.” Pollei loves the older generation because of their life stories and feels people need to respect the elderly more. “People like puppies, I like old people,” she said. When she walks into a restaurant with friends and there is an elderly couple sitting at a table, she said her friends will stare at her waiting for Pollei’s excited reaction.

Kidd Lucid, a chief executive dreamer, created Time-Peace, a four-philosophy symbol, which represents living in the present moment. Pollei said her favorite saying came from him, which is “stop worrying and start being.” She has the symbol tattooed on her thigh, along with six other tattoos on her foot, side, back and arm, all of which are covered by her clothing. “It’s a tree, a brain, and a clock. If you turn it upside down it’s a peace sign,” she said. “If you eliminate your worries of the past and the future and you live in the present moment,” she said, “99 percent of your problems will disappear.”

Growing up, Pollei’s family was not wealthy. “My parents were poor, dirt poor,” she said. All she ate was bologna and macaroni and cheese because they were cheap. To get by, she would steal food, like cereal and milk cartons, from her elementary school cafeteria. “It’s not something I am proud of because people get a wrong depiction of that,” she said. “But in that moment, I did it for what I needed, not for things that I wanted. Fending for yourself, I had to do that a lot.”

While she was a sophomore in high school, Pollei entered a dance competition hosted by Universal Dance Association and won a free trip to Paris. She represented the state of Florida and traveled with 49 other girls from the other states and performed under the Eiffel Tower on New Year’s Eve. “I was really, really lucky,” she said. She was allowed one guest, and chose her mother. “Other than that, my mom would have never seen the outside of America.  I was glad I was able to take her out of her humble little southerness and take her over to Paris because she was dumbfounded by the culture.”

Morales

Morales loves meeting new people and talking to them. “If I’m not socializing in the (Marshall Student Center) or walking around campus talking to random people…then I’m probably knocking on their doors or playing video games with them,” Morales said about the residents he oversees. The students across his room have a Nintendo 64, so he started playing Super Smash Brothers with them. In a relatively short amount of time, all the residents of the hall wanted to play. “We went to the flea market to buy extra controllers,” he said.

Morales’s closet is separated into his business and casual clothes. He has nine pairs of shoes, which are arranged by color. All of his clothes are hung with black hangers because “otherwise it looks tacky,” he said.  His clothes range from brightest to darkest: white, yellow, orange, pink, red, light blue, etc. “In the middle of my closet, I have 25 ties,” he said, and they are color coordinated. His biggest sections are white green and brown because he wears white shirts under his clothes, lots of green because of the university’s colors and brown for his fraternity Lambda Theta Phi.

If Morale’s was given a million dollars and did not have anything to worry about, the first thing he would do was visit his mother.  Morale’s is very family oriented and said, “It’s been about two months since I’ve seen her,” he said. He would also pay off her house and give her the rest of the money. He has a great relationship with his mother, since she has always supported him through everything, he said, and would want to repay her.

When he was a freshman, Morale’s drove up to Tallahassee with his roommates. While on back roads, he drove his friend’s Mazda RX3. He was pulled over driving 100 MPH in a 65 MPH zone at four in the morning. “I couldn’t go to court because it was near Tallahassee and I was in school when they had the court date set,” he said. He had a lawyer fight the case and instead of receiving a felony charge, he had to pay a five hundred dollar ticket because he did not have a history of any crimes. “It won’t happen again,” he said. “Never.”

The day after Thanksgiving, his family always buys a Christmas tree and decorates it. This family tradition ends with a sled Morale’s grandfather made his mother, called the Deborah Flyer. “Unless the tree is completely put up, she will not put it on,” he said. When he was in eighth grade, his house got robbed in Bradenton a week before Christmas. “All the presents were taken and the place was trashed,” he said. They were lucky to have dinner that year, but no presents to open. The following year was rough and his mother did not buy a Christmas tree because she was still devastated.“I remember drawing a picture on Christmas eve. It was a picture of a Christmas tree and I drew in the little Deborah Flyer and put it on the TV screen. My mom kept that and she laminated it and she puts it on the Christmas tree every year right before she puts on her sled.”

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