Professor Frank Orlando encourages all students to vote, but to first have a full understanding of who they are voting for.
Since the beginning of the Spring semester, the School of Arts and Sciences has been hosting a campus event known as “Meet Your Faculty,” which permits students to get to know Saint Leo’s faculty members in a more structured way. The most recent edition held on Mar. 20 was based on “The Challenges of Creating an Informed Citizenry in the 21st Century” with Professor Francis (Frank) Orlando as the featured faculty member.
Orlando is a Political Science Professor with also a major in Geography. He was born and grew up in Michigan State. There are a plethora of ways to study politics. However, Frank wanted to do more so he studied Institution.
Orlando studied Political Science for many reasons. His family is always talking about politics. Their TV is usually on the news, especially CNN. He loves sports and games because of the competition, so he found politics to be related because it is all about being competitive. He thought about how candidates try to win; how they strategize to succeed.
“Not that I was not interested in the actual policies, ‘cause I was certainly interested, but I was more interested in the competition,” said Orlando.
Every politician focuses on winning which causes them to do their best and remain very competitive regardless which position he or she is running for in the elections.
“We do not look at the goal of studying politics,” said Orlando.
According to Orlando, there is not a lot of students who vote during the elections. There are about 25 percent of young voters, while only 1/3 talks about politics. Young voters are not even aware of their representatives in Congress even are. Orlando suggested that the education system add Civics classes for High Schoolers to learn more about politics and create better future citizens.
“Not everyone is going to be an engineer,” said Frank, “everyone is going to be a citizen every day.”
Orlando also also expressed that, whether you vote or not, you will get the same result in politics.
“My students hate when I say our vote does not matter, but I love talking about it because it makes them so mad,” Orlando said. “It counts for sure, but it does not matter; the difference happens every ten years.”
Orlando’s advice to every college student about becoming a better citizen is to take political science courses, make sure you register to vote and know where your polling station is located, know about the absentee ballot and how to vote in it when you are away from where you are registered to vote. Also, know how to get involved in volunteering during the campaign, know how to read the news and what type of report is reliable and insulting.
“Try to understand your own biases when you are reading,” said Orlando.
Most importantly, students need to learn how to interact with people who disagree with their views because it is all about democracy.
