Diego Bethea will be completing his final term as the President of San Diego City College’s Associated Student Government at the end of the Spring 2024 semester. 

A business major, Bethea plans to spend one more semester at City College before transferring to either UC Riverside or CSU Los Angeles. 

ASG elections will be held the Spring 2024 semester for ASG Executive, Officer and Senator positions. Candidates interested in running for ASG must submit an election packet by April 19. The election will be held on April 29 through May 4.

Bethea sat down with City Times to reflect on his experience as City College ASG president.

This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

One of the things we’re working on is removing permission codes for whenever a student is enrolling into a class late. So maybe they just need one more class and they’re going through the class schedule and they’re like, “Oh, this class fits perfect for my schedule.” They’re late so they need a permission code from the professor. So they would contact the professor, the professor would give them back the permission code and they would input it into their My Report.

It’s another layer of just making it difficult if you’re taking an online class. The only way to reach out to that professor would be through email. You can’t go to class and just say, “Hey, I need a permission code to be officially enrolled in your class.” We have professors who are teaching multiple classes on campus as well as other campuses as well as their personal life, so sometimes an email can just get lost in the many emails that they get. So that’s something we’re really excited about.

DB: I don’t believe I have any regrets. I would say there’s some embarrassment. I definitely let the title of being president get to my head. At one point it was like, “Oh my god, I’m president,” even though I wasn’t doing as much as I would like … I would say that the biggest one is me letting my ego get to me and preventing me from experiencing different things, having conversations and just getting things done.

DB: I would hope the relationships between our different communities would be long-lasting … Everyone’s open to having good conversation, but building that relationship of “Oh, yeah, I know this person. I’ll just reach out and see what’s going on.” (Academic) Senate president Maria-Jose Zeledon-Perez is really good at that. Making sure that we met an hour before College Council with the Academic Senate, Classified Senate and ASG, having conversations with each other and just filling in each other on what we’re doing, what we need help with, what we need support with. So continuing on those relationships across all the boards would be a legacy that I hope to pass on.