Rachel Smith is in her second year serving as student trustee for the Board.
Rachel Smith saw the “archaic-looking bug” under her chair and took decisive action.
She squished it with her foot.
The insect assassination took place while Smith, appointed last year as UTC’s student representative on the University of Tennessee System Board of Trustees, was sitting in her first board meeting. Thinking nothing of the recent extermination, she continued to sit through the meeting.
Then John D. Tickle went up front to speak. First District representative for the Board of Trustees and the namesake of UT Knoxville’s Tickle College of Engineering, had watched Smith’s bug encounter.
“This was my first meeting and he’s giving his speech … so the governor is there, all of these media people,” Smith says. “He’s giving this heartfelt speech and then he looks at me.
Then he introduced “our newest trustee, Rachel Smith.”
“I was watching a bug earlier, and she just crushed it. She’s a killer. Don’t get in her way,” he said.
Smith quickly recovered from this face-palm moment and says that, by the time Tickle’s speech was over, everyone had forgotten about the bug incident. But it’s something she won’t forget.
A look inside the ticking clock
A double major in Spanish and communications, Smith says serving as a trustee has given her valuable knowledge on how UTC and the UT system operate.
“It’s like looking at a clock—taking it apart to see how everything functions,” she says. “It’s really interesting to see why things are happening. From a student perspective you always see what happened, but you normally don’t see why.”
As a trustee, her job is to be both the voice and the messenger on the board for the students. This past spring, Smith served in the President’s Budget Advisory Group as it analyzed the budget and made decisions to ensure students saw the lowest tuition increase possible.
She was impressed by how committee members and leaders championed to keep costs down.
“I think it’s easy for people who don’t know why things are happening to blame something or think that something was a wrong decision, but what I’ve learned about the UT system is that the people that work here. They really care. They’re really trying to make sure that students have the best experience.
It is still a mystery who nominated Smith to be a part of the board of trustees. But after she was vetted by the governor’s office, then named a trustee, she’s learned just as much about herself as she has about the university system. The experience has been humbling, she says, showing her that being a leader is more than just being a decision-maker. Leadership requires listeners and relationship builders, she says.
When she isn’t attending meetings with the board or with student representatives from campuses such as UT-Martin and UT-Knoxville, Smith loves working with music. She performs her own songs she won second place at last year’s UTC’s Got Talent) and even teaches lessons in voice, drums, piano and guitar.
This past summer, she spent a month in a small town in Nicaragua teaching music lessons to students of all ages and organizing a concert with them. Her last day in Nicaragua, all 17 students boarded a bus for the hour-long commute to the city where she was staying and threw her a surprise party.
“It was the sweetest thing. I didn’t even have enough Spanish to communicate how I was feeling because I was so shaken,” Smith recalls.
The UT Board of Trustees is the governing body of the state’s university system. Its 26 members oversee the system’s educational and operational activities of the schools, including UTC.
Board members include one voting and one non-voting student, one voting and one non-voting faculty, a rotation of representatives from state congressional district and counties, as well as the governor, the president of the university system, the Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture and Commissioner of Education and the executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
Student trustees serve on the board for two years, the first year as a non-voting member and the second as a voting member. Last year, the other student trustee who served with Smith was from UT-Martin; this year, the second trustee is from UT-Knoxville. There is always a balance to ensure that students from every campus are represented.
