Serving as student body president molded these 4 Tar Heels
As students prepare to choose their next leader, the current SBP and three alumni look back at their time in office.
The UNC-Chapel Hill student body president represents over 30,000 students, serves on the UNC Board of Trustees and works alongside University leadership and other Student Government leaders.
This week, Carolina students will elect a new SBP in the spring general election.
In honor of the occasion, the current SBP and three alumni reflected on how the job shaped them.
Houston Summers ’16
Summers taking the oath of office to become an ex officio member of the BOT on May 28, 2015. (Melanie Busbee/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Houston Summers might be the only person to have a professional baseball career before becoming a collegiate student body president. He’s at least in rare company.
After playing in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ and St. Louis Cardinals’ minor league systems, the Greensboro, North Carolina, native enrolled at Carolina at 24.
“Folks would ask me, ‘How old are you?’ And I would never really answer with my age,” Summers said. “I would say, ‘Oh, I’m a freshman.’”
He was a 27-year-old junior when he won the 2015 SBP election.
Why he ran: Summers kept competing after baseball. He walked on to the Carolina track and field team as a javelin thrower and earned All-ACC honors.
His decision to run for SBP was inspired by the issue of the day. “I did not really feel that UNC student-athletes were being portrayed in a very good light,” Summers said. “It wasn’t my experience. Oh, ‘Athletes don’t go to class. Athletes don’t do this.’ Man, I work my butt off. I see my teammates working their butts off. They’re going to class. They’re in study hall.”
What defined his term: Summers said Carolina needed “to sit down and hear one another out and get to know one another.”
He felt connected with different groups across campus and established a speaker series that then-Chancellor Carol L. Folt and other University leaders, including coaches, participated in. He called it “Houston, We Have a Problem.”
Reflecting upon his term, Summers is fond of the collaboration with the Black Student Movement and National Pan-Hellenic Council that led to the NPHC Legacy Plaza on South Campus. “NPHC and BSM leadership did all the heavy lifting. I’m not taking credit for that, but I was very proud of that because NPHC has been a big deal on Carolina’s campus for a very long time,” Summers said.
While not popular at the time, turning Student Stores over to Barnes & Noble College was also a needed and shrewd decision, Summers said.
The Daily Tar Heel (Feb. 19, 2015)
Skills gained: Summers said he benefited from his baseball career, which taught him to remain even keeled. But he learned lots on the job, including the importance of public speaking and choosing words wisely.
Serving on BOT also imparted financial and budgetary wisdom. Summers worked as a business analyst and consultant at Deloitte and is now a partner at Sasser Restoration, a commercial disaster remediation business.
Reyna Walters-Morgan ’99
Walters-Morgan being sworn onto the BOT on May 28, 1998. (Dan Sears/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Born in Brooklyn, New York, but raised in North Carolina, Reyna Walters-Morgan spent a weekend at UNC-Chapel Hill at Project Uplift, a summer enrichment program for rising high school seniors.
“I had the best time,” said Walters-Morgan, the first woman of color at Carolina to serve as SBP. “There were so many amazing student groups on campus that came and interacted with us.”
Why she ran: Walters-Morgan quickly became involved with the Campus Y as a first-year student and gained an appreciation for the importance of student voices in decision-making.
“My formative year was definitely my first year, and the lessons I learned and the things that impacted me really did carry me through to my senior year,” said Walters-Morgan, currently the Democratic National Committee’s vice chair for civic engagement and voter participation.
It wasn’t lost on her that Carolina only had one woman serve as SBP before her. “I also started to think about what was it that made women feel like this was not a position that they could achieve,” Walters-Morgan said.
What defined her term: While calls for a freestanding Black Cultural Center began well before Walters-Morgan’s time as SBP and didn’t become reality until years after her term, she said she championed the cause.
She also helped finalize plans for the Carolina Computing Initiative. “The idea was that every incoming student would be given a laptop, and it would be included in their student fees,” Walters-Morgan said. “That was huge at the time.”
Other achievements included contributing to work leading to the opening of a satellite polling location near campus a year after she graduated. “Voting rights issues have really become one of the things that I think is part of my purpose and calling,” said Walters-Morgan.
The Daily Tar Heel (Feb. 18, 1998)
Skills gained: Walters-Morgan worked at the North Carolina General Assembly after graduation and later became a lawyer. She’s also worked as a presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Justice.
She puts skills gained from being SBP into three buckets:
- Practical: “Time management is something I really had to learn. Also making sure I could articulate key points in a succinct manner, especially when I was doing a lot of the legislative work.”
- Political: “There are some relationships that are a little more adversarial than others. Even in those adversarial relationships, you have to find a way to get your priorities through.”
- Personal: “I developed a very, very thick skin because what I also realized is that for everything you do, there are going to be some people who think it’s the best thing in the world, and there are going to be an equal number of people who think it’s the worst thing.”
Jen Daum ’03
Daum and then-Chancellor James Moeser at a ribbon cutting for the newly renovated Robert B. House Undergraduate Library on Aug. 13, 2002. (Dan Sears/UNC-Chapel Hill)
A Wisconsin native, Jen Daum wanted to go to a new part of the country for college and was impressed by Carolina’s affordability. Then she visited.
“I just fell in love. I also got lucky because I visited on one of those perfect spring days when everyone is throwing Frisbees and the sky is beautiful,” said Daum, who has now lived in Colombia for 12 years and works as a country director for nonprofit Mercy Corps.
Why she ran: Daum was involved with Student Government to some degree her whole time at Carolina. She worked under previous SBPs Nicholas Heinke and Bradley Matthews and gained an appreciation for how seriously they took their jobs.
“It’s very rare for that level of position to have the influence that it does at a university,” Daum said. “I think that’s something very special about UNC.”
She said she won because she knocked on every door she could and covered lots of ground on campus. She also used a friend’s Pomeranian as a campaign dog.
What defined her term: The evergreen topic of tuition was hotly contested. Daum also recalled working alongside then-Chancellor James Moeser amid national attention regarding the University’s first-year summer reading program book choice.
One accomplishment she’s proud of is a campaign reform act resulting in SBP candidates receiving funding. “There was a criticism, that is correct, that a lot of student body presidents had come from more privileged backgrounds,” Daum said. “It costs a lot of money to run.”
The Daily Tar Heel (Feb. 20, 2002)
Skills gained: Daum said she strengthened her public speaking skills and practiced building consensus. An unexpected ability that’s stuck with her in her nonprofit work is bringing joy to the job.
“In the same way that people are volunteers when they’re working on Student Government, you have to motivate staff and inspire them,” she said.
Adolfo Alvarez ’26
Alvarez speaking at New Student Convocation on Aug. 17, 2025, at the Dean E. Smith Center. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Carolina’s current SBP only moved to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 16, had no ties to UNC-Chapel Hill and knew nothing about it. But when Adolfo Alvarez attended a concert nearby and drove by the University, he looked it up, became impressed and applied.
“I remember an admissions officer telling me they were going to give me anything I needed for me to be able to come to the University,” said Alvarez, a Carolina Covenant scholar and Carolina’s first Latino SBP.
Why he ran: Alvarez didn’t have his sights set on the role. But he had an array of Carolina experiences — serving as a campaign lead for Model United Nations, working as a teaching assistant and working in the University Development office — that he felt qualified him as a student leader.
“It was actually pretty spontaneous,” he said of his decision to run. “I was in D.C., and I told my friends I want to run for student body president. We just made it happen.”
What’s defined his term: Alvarez has had the opportunity to bring a student’s perspective to all sorts of University decisions and topics and said he’s strived to provide transparency on how he works with administrators.
One initiative he’s particularly proud of is the Carolina Closet, a still-in-development service that will provide students with free access to professional attire for interviews, internships and job opportunities. He said it’ll open later this semester.
The Daily Tar Heel (Feb. 19, 2025)
Skills gained: Alvarez said he’s strengthened his financial acumen and improved at listening to a wide swath of ideas through the role as well as accepting criticism. He wants to pursue a law degree or Master of Business Administration and sees himself going into public service at some point.
“Our University is like a small city,” Alvarez said. “You represent a population, and you’re in charge of making sure that they’re advocated for in your role, so I do think that it’s preparing me.”
