By Maiya Tomlin
When I asked SGA President Cate Turner how her first Sunday of the school year was going, she answered, “very productive and busy, but that is how I like my days.”
That’s a good thing, because Cate was elected last spring to serve as SGA Student Body President for the 2026-2027 school year. She is incredibly excited. Having been her friend since kindergarten, I know she is also incredibly busy, so I was eager to discuss her routines and aspirations for this unique school year.
I caught her for a chat after returning from a hot yoga class at Yonder—conducting an interview at a strange time is truly the art of an OnLion Back-on-the-Bank article. But before we dwelled on the death of the Williams Plaza and theater (R.I.P.), I wanted to chat with her about how she has been, so we can get to know the girl behind every Tuesday morning meeting and SGA gathering.
I first asked her how she spent her “productive and busy” Sunday. “I woke up, and I went to church, and then I ran to Goldberg’s with some of my friends after church before leaving early to go play tennis for a few hours, and then I came home and cleaned my room,” she said. I admired how she could list everything when I struggled to recall what I had for dinner last night.
“I only know this because I’m doing a ‘Day in my Life’” she explained, laughing. If you are unfamiliar, a ‘Day in my Life,’ or a ‘DIML’ for short, is when you take pictures of what you did in a day and upload them to TikTok, typically just for your friends to see. As an avid ‘Day in my Lifer,’ I’ll admit that it does get you excited to complete tasks throughout the day.
After cleaning her room, she finished her summer reading while tanning before conducting a final proofread on her AP Art History summer assignment. She then finished off the day with her yoga class. Productive indeed!
However, Cate was not just busy in Atlanta this summer; she spent a lot of time traveling. “I would say my highlight was definitely the Greece trip with Lovett,” she told me. It was in Greece that she found the inspiration for her presidential motto, “Faith over fear.” That makes sense, because while there, she rededicated her faith at the baptismal site of Saint Lydia, visited a number of churches and monasteries, and read First Corinthians in the archaeological site of Corinth.
As life-changing and spiritual as that trip was, I did have to ask her about another part of her summer…that involved me. “But I also thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Nantucket with my friends Maiya and Catherine, one of my favorite parts of each year,” she quickly said. There’s my shoutout!
Besides seeing the world near(ish) and far, she filled out her college applications and wrote her essays, and she took advantage of the opportunity to read more books and watch more movies over the summer. “I read Wuthering Heights for summer reading, of course, but I’m about to start Lessons in Chemistry,” she told me. “I’ve also begun to have a Spider-Man epidemic where I kind of watched all the movies within a week after each other before seeing the new one,” she added.
When she wasn’t engaging in these more chill activities, she was exercising. “I started to get into running!” she told me. “You can tell the school that,” she said jokingly before adding, “I don’t like it, but I do it anyway because I know it’s good for me.” She also moves her body by using the Peloton machine in her house, which she told me she definitely prefers to running.
Senior year brings a lot of changes for students, and the same applies for Cate. She told me she is excited to have a free period for the first time in a while. She also said her workload is easier, “which is very nice in terms of class-wise. So I’m going to have a lot more free time, especially in the afternoons, I hope.”
Now that she’s president, I wondered what aspirations she has for this year. “My hope is that this year runs very smoothly and is very memorable,” she said. “I think most of what has changed is actually running pretty well, and I just hope that the whole school has a good school year overall.” She’d like to do her part to help that happen. Luckily, Cate has an amazing cabinet beside her to help ensure she reaches her goals. She told me that she and Mrs. Hooker chose people for her cabinet from all corners of the senior class, including different genders and people outside her group of close friends, as the cabinet assists with tasks related to the whole student body.
While many of her goals are related to what’s happening this year here on the Riverbank, she does have her eye on the future. “I also hope I get into college,” she said. “That would be great.”
