At first, Alex Archuleta felt scared.
She was a freshman sitting in a corner of an auditorium in Phillips Hall listening to upperclassmen go back and forth about student government.
Her mind just raced with questions she couldn’t answer.
“What are bills?”
“What are Robert’s Rules of Order?”
“Why are they speaking like that?”
What a difference a few years back.
Archuleta, a senior communication major from Santa Fe, New Mexico, is now the president of the Student Government Association. Before that, she served as the SGA secretary as a sophomore and the SGA vice president as a junior.
She now helps manage a budget of around $100,000 per semester. In the process, she has worked to make SGA more financially responsible and more responsive to the requests of HPU’s at least 120 organizations.
In doing so, she has learned a few things about herself — how to delegate, manage her time, hit deadlines and have tough conversations.
Those skills helped Archuleta become HPU’s Extraordinary Leader for the month of January.
But how did a student from Santa Fe end up at HPU?
A chance conversation.
HPU’s Drawing Card of Camaraderie
Archuleta was a high school sophomore, touring a few colleges in North Carolina with her mom. At one stop, they struck up a conversation with another mom-daughter team when the daughter gave Archuleta some advice.
“You need to see High Point,” she told Archuleta. “It’s really beautiful.”
Archuleta knew she wanted to head east for college, and she chose North Carolina as her prime spot because her mom worked remotely for a company in Raleigh and North Carolina was the complete opposite of New Mexico in weather, culture and food.
So, the next year, Archuleta and her mom visited HPU. They knew right away the advice they received was spot-on. Moreover, Archuleta liked the immediate camaraderie she had with everyone she met.
But she had some questions about HPU – and herself.
At Santa Fe Prep, Archuleta captained both the basketball and volleyball teams. And as the only child of a single mom, she was raised to be independent and thoughtful, not afraid to speak her mind.
So, she wondered if a student who graduated high school with 35 other students in her class could find her own niche at HPU, a university of 5,000 students.
Archuleta found out her freshman year. But not without a little help.
SGA: A Training Ground of Leadership
Lydia Prior, a junior from Culpepper, Virginia, had a question for Archuleta.
“Would you be interested in being in the SGA?”
“What’s the SGA?” Archuleta responded.
Prior, the SGA secretary, filled her in. Prior was Archuleta’s big sister in Kappa Delta, and she told Archuleta how the SGA secretary had been a position held by someone in their sorority for the past several years.
That one conversation coaxed Archuleta into a Phillips Hall auditorium as a freshman and convinced her to join SGA. That one decision helped Archuleta become more capable than she ever would have imagined.
“I don’t think the success and opportunities I’ve had here would happen at another school because High Point makes leadership opportunities accessible to many students,” Archuleta says today. “I took advantage of that with a lot of people helping me.”
One of those people was Dr. Paul Kittle, HPU’s dean of students and assistant vice president for student life.
“She came in as a freshman wise beyond her years,” he says of Archuleta. “She had this ability to gain the support of her peers. They trusted her, sought her advice, and she was always poised, not putting up a front. She was just her.”
Archuleta’s leadership skills helped her with her job as a resident assistant.
As a junior, she was an RA to about 40 upperclassmen in York Hall. This year, though, Archuleta is an RA to 65 first-year students in Finch Hall.
She’s found that first-year students do lots of talking and engage in desk chair jousting at 1 a.m. But she’s also that found first-year students need a confidante, someone they can trust and talk to for hours about everything.
When that happens, Archuleta thinks one thing: All those hours of RA training, that was worth it.
A Daughter Grows Up
As an intern for Codarus, a sales management organization that deals with furniture and home accessories, Archuleta has worked the Dallas Market Center once in Dallas, Texas, and the biannual High Point Market five times.
As a freshman, she volunteered at HPU’s Community Writing Center situated in a church basement near campus, and she helped local students with their homework.
That includes a girl, no older than 8, with two working parents and seven other siblings.
Archuleta has come to understand the importance of hard work. Her mom, Tracy, works two jobs in information technology to help pay for Archuleta’s college expenses.
They’ve always been close, mother and daughter. They send text messages to each other several times a day. Last spring was no different.
Archuleta studied abroad for one semester in Florence, Italy, and those mom-daughter correspondences continued — until her mom came to visit.
Together in Italy, boarding trains bound to a place her mom had never been, Archuleta helped her mom navigate the confusing maze of travel.
Travel always had flustered her mom. But in train stations everywhere in Italy, Tracy Archuleta realized her daughter, her only child, had grown up.
“Alex, you got it, I trust you,” she’d say. “Now, where we going?”
Her daughter always knew.