Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of three articles profiling the candidates for president of the Government of the Student Body. The GSB elections will be conducted online March 8 and 9.

Call him Mr. Fix-it.

Angry that tuition is rising and Iowa State’s budgets keep getting slashed?

Drew Miller says he can help.

Don’t like the way Iowa State’s tailgating situation was left after last fall’s controversy?

Give him a chance, and Miller says it will be taken care of.

Of course, Miller said, these promises are nothing new, nor are they unique to only his campaign for Government of Student Body president. But his record — one that includes work on stopping the controversial “hard waiver” option considered earlier this year by the Student Health Insurance Committee, pushing for the CyRide biodiesel bill and chairing this year’s voter registration drive — puts him and running mate Jennifer Riggs above the rest.

Since a write-in campaign Miller organized put him and eight of his friends into vacant seats on the Government of Student Body, the self-described student activist has more than made his presence known within GSB — so much so that he was approached earlier this year by a few fellow senators who wanted him on their ticket for the vice president’s seat. Miller turned them down before deciding on running as president with Riggs as vice president.

“I felt like Jenn and I were the people who were most effective at dealing with the issues that students care about,” he said. “Students deserve someone who is going to work actively on their behalf.”

It was Riggs’ idea to run, Miller said, but he immediately supported it. He’d worked with Riggs before, and was impressed by her dedication.

“I thought that she and I could accomplish something that the GSB had never accomplished before,” he said. “We could make the GSB relevant.”

They began their work late, he said, after the other slates had been actively planning their runs for the executive offices. For a campaign manager, Miller found an unlikely ally in Andrew Tugan, a conservative-minded fellow senator.

Together, Miller, Riggs, Tugan and a host of other supporters began to look for a way to put the two into the executive seats.

It hasn’t been all been good times.

“There have been ups and downs, definitely,” Miller said, looking back over his long month of campaigning. “It plays with your emotions. After the debates, we were both really happy. All the people we’d talked to said we’d made good points. But when we were working on the signboards, we found out that something on them wasn’t right, and we had to start all over again. That always brings you down.”

At one point, he said, Riggs spent all day working on a first set of fliers and had finally become satisfied with them. But when she restarted the computer she’d been working on — an Instructional Technology Center laptop that purges all desktop items when restarted — they were all erased.

“The moral of the campaign story is that it’s not as much fun to campaign for students as it is to work for students,” he said. “Jenn and I both feel better when we have our feet on the ground and are accomplishing something substantive.”

If he wins, Miller said, it may prove more of a challenge than a reprieve. There’s a lot of work to be done if GSB is to be changed to fit his ideas of what it should be.

“Students should see GSB as a resource, as an ally and as a force that works for them,” he said. “It’s played a muted role in student lives.”

Miller said if he’s not elected, the consequences could be stagnation inside GSB.

“I don’t feel confident that GSB is going to change if Jenn and I aren’t elected,” Miller said.

After all the campaigning, all the speeches and promises and all the talk, for Miller, it comes down to one thing: Can the winner do what needs to be done to change GSB and help students?

“It’s fun to sit on top of a pile of $1.5 million and lord it over student groups, but I don’t think that’s what GSB should be doing,” Miller said.

He and Riggs are the only ones, he said, who have proven they can change GSB for the better.

“I know what I’m doing,” Miller said. “I’ve done this before. If students want someone they can count on to get things done, they should vote for us.”