Dani Goodreau is USC’s next student body vice president. She campaigned on mental health, veterans’ issues and student senate accountability, and won with 60 percent of the vote. Ever since campaigning began on Feb. 1, Goodreau has been everywhere on campus — doing organization visits, arguing the Momentum platform at the debate and larger than life on a Greene Street poster.
“Campaigning has 100 percent changed me in so many ways,” she said. Before running for executive office, Goodreau walked around campus with her eyes on the ground or her phone. She knew people from Student Government and the Student Veterans Association, but wasn’t recognizable to most of the student body. Now, she said, she’s aware of everyone she passes and feels like it’s her job to try and connect with them. It still hasn’t really sunk in that her job is to represent the interests of 34,000 people.
“I woke up this morning still crying,” Goodreau said the day after the election results were announced.
“If you told me when I was growing up that I was going to college, I never ever would have believed it,” she said, “let alone if you told me I was the VP of the student body.”
Goodreau grew up on a farm in Wisconsin with her dad, three brothers and a sister. Her favorite thing to do was watch CNN with her grandfather, and she wanted to be a war correspondent when she grew up.
“I dreamed of faraway places, and I dreamed of adventure,” she said.
It was a hard childhood. She started supporting herself at 18. She got a job and started working, but after visiting her brother in the military, she fell in love with the armed forces. She left home and served for seven years, with deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Everybody asks, 'Oh, were you scared?'” Goodreau said. “I hate to say this, but you just get used to it.”
She worked in an air medical evacuation team, going on 30-hour missions to extract wounded soldiers and transport them to safety to be treated or pass in peace. It was a high-stress and traumatic environment. In an almost unnervingly matter-of-fact way, she explained how the living quarters on the base where she lived would be the first places targeted in a strike. That way, there would be the most casualties.
“Being exposed to a lot of trauma, you're really desensitized,” she said. “It wasn’t healthy.”
But the military helped her gain confidence and taught her that solutions were rarely black and white. In Iraq she spent time with Iraqi women and girls in a program that hoped to foster a better relationship between Iraqi civilians and the American military. The women didn’t speak the same language as she did, but Goodreau connected with their spirit.
“I’ve been a lot of places and I've done a lot of things, but I think that was the most touching,” she said. “I think it's what really helps me here.”
Once she reached the highest position available to her, she realized that she needed to move on. She needed change and opportunity — something she hoped to find in medical school.
So she shifted her life for a second time and went back home to Wisconsin to apply to universities.
Why USC?
“I used to lock myself in my room and read Nicholas Sparks books, which is why I love the Carolinas so much,” she said.
But coming to college when you’re older than 20 is difficult. She hated it when she first came, because she felt so different from the other students. She woke up at 6 a.m. every day and went straight until midnight, often spending 12 hours a day in the library, and neglected relationships with friends. And while she’d left the military with the idea of going to medical school, she increasingly realized how unhappy and unhealthy she was. So she changed majors to public relations, and then just this semester changed again to political science.
Goodreau was inspired both by working as the assistant to the director of boards and commissions in the governor’s office and by working in Student Government, where Michael Parks gave her the newly created position of secretary of veterans affairs. In that position, she works closely with the student senate to pass legislation.
“You don’t think that you’re going to learn something from an 18-year-old,” she said. “It’s just been amazing. I really truly feel like I’ve found myself.”
As a newly elected officer, she still wakes up at 6 a.m. But, she said, now she’s not waking up just for herself.
“It’s a greater understanding of realizing every single thing you do is going to affect 34,000 different people,” she said.
Even though Goodreau certainly isn’t a traditional student, there’s something in her that everyone can relate to. She came from out of state. She’s changed her major twice. She’s part of a minority on campus. She’s struggled with mental health. And when she wants something, she throws herself into it wholeheartedly.
“I want people to know that you can build the life that you want from nothing,” she said.