SCC student eyes UW prize
Gavin Tucker didn’t get his fill of student government during his year as president of the student body at Spokane Community College. So he’s running for the same position at the University of Washington – before he’s even officially a student there.
Tucker is running a long-distance, and perhaps long-shot, campaign for the student presidency at UW, where he will enroll next fall. He figures that with the size of the UW student body, his obscurity as a candidate isn’t too much greater than his opponents’.
“There are 20-some-odd thousand students at the University of Washington,” he said, and he’s hoping that means his opponents’ chances “are about as slim as my chances.”
UW students voted this week, and Tucker should know the results sometime today. The 28-year-old Spokane native says he’s serious about his candidacy and not running to lay the groundwork for a future campaign.
“I really feel optimistic about my chances,” he said. “I’m kind of the eternal optimist, I guess.”
Tucker plans to study aerospace engineering at UW. His path toward college fits a familiar profile for many community college students – starting later in life, looking to balance his personal life with the demands of school, and eventually transferring to a four-year institution.
In the Community Colleges of Spokane system, hundreds of students each year transfer to public four-year schools in the state. Nearly 1,100 students who graduated from the system last year went on to four-year schools; just 23 of those went on to UW, the state’s largest and most expensive university.
Steve Hanson, SCC president, said Tucker’s field of study is one of the more competitive disciplines at UW, and his acceptance reflects well on SCC and the students it sends into the state’s universities.
He said that Tucker has been an ambitious and hardworking student, and his long-distance campaign might be a first.
“I’ve never heard of anybody doing it before,” he said. “I didn’t even know you could do it.”
Tucker grew up in Spokane and graduated from Central Valley High School before entering the Navy. After his discharge, he worked in various jobs around Spokane and met his future wife when they were both working at Sears. She was studying interior design at the time, working toward her bachelor’s degree at Washington State University Spokane, after starting at Spokane Falls Community College.
“When she graduated, then it was my turn,” he said.
He enrolled in 2004 and will earn his associate’s degree in SCC commencement ceremonies in June. He says he has enjoyed serving as the school’s student president and is proud that he helped push through a law in Olympia this year that expanded some protections for textbook sales to community college students.
Tucker’s candidacy at UW may end up being part of an MTV “True Life” documentary. Film crews for the station shot footage at one of the campaign events in Seattle he attended. They’re also shooting at other schools, so Tucker doesn’t know whether he’ll be in the final show.
His campaign has been made up of several one-day trips to Seattle to meet with student groups. He says he’s often asked how he can represent the students if he hasn’t been one yet himself. He says he tells them he can’t – at least not yet.
“But given my track record at SCC and the fact that I’m a quick learner, I will be ready by the time school starts in the fall,” he said.