“There’s a place for everyone here-everyone,” said Dolly McGeever, secretary of Nicholls’s Student Government Association, who recently completed her first year in the position and now reflects on the past and the future of the organization.”I came on board in May 2008,” she said. “Believe me; it’s taken every moment I have just to get a handle on it because no one was here the year before.”
McGeever said the position was unfilled for a year after former secretary Elaine Musso left for a position in the Louisiana Center for Women and Government on campus. McGeever, who originally applied for a department position in early 2008, did not hear back from the University for several months due to a hiring freeze by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
She now considers the late start a blessing because she missed having to settle into the new position during the middle of the spring semester.
“Otherwise, I would have been thrown into spring elections, Mr. and Ms. Nicholls and all that,” she said. “So I thank the University for sparing me that.”
However, McGeever said her first day was still intimidating. She said because one of the other University secretaries was on vacation, there was no one there to show her anything. Her typewriter was broken, and her computer had to be sent off to University computing for repairs. There were files everywhere, and the SGA president had boxes stacked throughout the office. The two officers who were there to help her managed to blow out an electrical fuse, sending the office into darkness for several hours.
“It was a nightmare,” McGeever said. “I thought ‘this is really bad,’ but being the trooper that I am, I stayed.”
With McGeever’s “trooper” attitude and with help from her predecessor, she spent the next year re-organizing the entire SGA filing system as well as keeping up with day-to-day operations.
“It was a matter of organization,” she said. “Last year was mostly just getting the office situated and getting the students’ needs met.”
She said last year was a learning period for her, but now that she is teaching the incoming officers and senators, she feels much more helpful.
McGeever grew up in Cut Off and graduated from Nicholls in 1971 with an associate’s degree in office administration. She started working in Houma, where she met and married her husband, Michael McGeever.
In 1990, they moved to the Covington-Mandeville area on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where she began working for a law firm in New Orleans. McGeever commuted over the 24-mile long causeway everyday and attended night classes at the University of New Orleans, where she received her paralegal certification in 1995.
Then four years ago her husband took a job at Sugarland Country Club, and they moved back to the Houma-Thibodaux area.
McGeever said her experience working with lawyers has really helped in her current position. She said lawyers work best on a last-minute basis, but their support staff does not. She said it has always been difficult to match those personalities.
“With the staff I’m working with now, a lot of the last-minute stuff is because they have other things on their plate,” McGeever said. “I’m trying to keep them on track, which is what you do with an attorney-make sure deadlines don’t go by, because they have a lot going on too.”
She said that helping raise her son, Brooks, has really affected the way she works with the young people in the SGA. She tries not to let anything bad happen because she feels she “wasn’t there to catch them when they fall.”
McGeever said she likes to watch over the students but allows them to make their own mistakes so they can learn from them. But, she is always there to lend a hand.
She said it can be difficult because a lot of the students haven’t held positions before and haven’t even been on the senate, so they need a lot of guidance. She is often amazed how they continue to be effective with all of their classes, jobs and other organizations.
“I think in their hearts this is where they really want to be,” she said. “This is what I love about working with SGA. I’m very impressed with the people I work with.
