Following a grueling campaign process, junior Lourdes Cardamone, of Erie CO, and her party, Temple Tomorrow, won the endorsement of the student body to serve as the executive branch of the 25/26 Temple Student Government.
On March 26th and 27th, Temple students took to the polls to elect the executive branch of their Student Government for the 2025-2026 school year, choosing between two campaigning parties: TUnited, led by Yaam Malka and William Walker, and Temple Tomorrow, headed by Temple Honors’ own Lourdes Cardamone and her running mate, Janeese Hochstetler. Cardamone and Hochstetler’s Temple Tomorrow decisively took victory, accumulating close to 82% of the more than 1,100 ballots cast during the 48 hour voting window.
Cardamone, a junior political science major, has been involved with the past two Temple Student Government administrations, and is ready to tackle the additional challenges the office of Student Body President comes with.
“I feel so excited. I'm so ready,” Cardamone said, “Jan and I, we have a very solid plan, and we’re feeling very supported by the current administration in transitioning.”
While the behind-the-scenes of getting yourself elected is, in Cardamone’s books, “intense, to say the least,”, she feels it ultimately left her “happy to have gotten the experience.”
“One of the biggest things people don't really see is all the work that comes into assembling a team, and deciding the rhetoric of how you're going to sell that team and the campaign,” Cardamone said, “This isn’t something that we picked up on a whim. I’ve been considering [running] for quite a few months, and even within my previous experiences in TSG, I’ve been collecting policy ideas for the past two years.”
Aside from her work with previous TSG administrations, Cardamone has served on the Honors Student Forum, Temple Honors’ student representative body, for the past two years. She has also taught sections of REACT, the Honors Program’s first year seminar, as a peer instructor, and cites the leadership skills she learned from both taking and teaching the course as being indispensable tools in her successful campaign.
“I think having a first year seminar where we dedicate weeks to learning about how to be a good leader made me realize that maybe I'm a lot more capable than I think I actually am,” said Cardamone.
Temple Honors faculty have also helped prepare Cardamone to take on her new challenge. “Taking REACT with Amanda, and then teaching it with Lizzie,” she said, “and also working with everyone in Forum as well; I think I would not be who I am today without that encouragement, and that push, to be the leader that I wish to see.
Temple Tomorrow’s campaign platform centered around improving and promoting access to Temple’s existing resources for students, as well as fostering more inclusivity and diversity on campus through the proposed addition of an Chief of Equity, Accessibility, and Wellness Officer within Temple Student Government. Cardamone hopes that students resonate with her party’s ideas, and views her campaign’s transparency and openness as reasons why students should, and do, want to listen.
“I really, really want us to be known for being open, and promoting accessibility, and promoting belonging,” she said, “being very much open to constructive criticism and very much open to actually listening to students and what they want to hear, what they want to see. I think that was a big reason why voters and people in general were interested and kind of drawn in; this was very much by the students, for the students.”
Cardamone hopes to leave a legacy that “doesn't center around just one person, one campaign, or even one administration”, instead ensuring her time in office is spent fostering inclusivity and diversity of thought.
“We are open and inviting and expanding; not necessarily expanding the size of the team, but expanding our reach, what we can impact, what we touch, and what we can change,” said Cardamone. “We are here to make sure that everybody feels they belong.”