Reilly's Ramblings

A man is in his office at the Krone Advising Center on a busy, November Wednesday afternoon. He is at his desk working on his schedule for the next day.

Alex Watters is a first-year adviser at Morningside College and a member of the city council in Sioux City, Iowa. His regular schedule is full every day between city council duties and his responsibilities in Morningside College.

He graduated from Morningside College then returned as an adviser to help out students who are coming out of high school and entering the college world. He graduated with a major in political science and global history.

He is overloaded completing both jobs at the same time. Doing two jobs at once means that there are times he can’t do everything he wants to in one day.

He has short brown hair, blue eyes, and wears a professional-looking sweater or a white, long sleeve dress shirt with a blazer. He wears slacks and dress shoes most of the time, but once in a while, he wears blue jeans with tennis shoes.

He is a long-winded talker that can talk for at least 20 minutes. With this ability, he has to take breaths of oxygen and take a drink of water from a pouch occasionally.

He came to Morningside on a golf scholarship. His golf handicap was a plus three to plus four. He also said that it “wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.”

Alex doesn’t play golf because he is in a motorized wheelchair. He sustained a spinal cord injury in a diving accident. This injury hasn’t stopped him from doing what he wants to do in life. He continues to live his life to the fullest every single day.

One of his students, Hailey Barrus, thinks that he has been great as a first-year adviser. “He’s a super cool guy and easy to talk to.”

One of his co-workers, Kate Miltenberger, who is also a first-year adviser at Morningside, says he is a great co-worker. “He’s lots of fun. He has a smile on his face and a song in his heart. He always gets the mood up in the office when everybody is tired and stressed.”

He recently won the city council election in November. He is now serving his first full term as a member of the city council. The length of a city council term is four years.

He balances city council and Morningside College duties by making sure that everything in his schedule is in order when it comes to times in a day.

He has to have “patience, time management, and be able to schedule what you need and can do for the day.”

Being a part of Morningside College and a member of the city council means that an average day is a very busy one for Alex. He only gets six to seven hours of sleep, but he says that “six to eight hours is the sweet spot for me.”

With the busy schedule on his plate, he doesn’t have a lot of free time on his hands. He said, “I do the best I can to have free time and have it whenever I can.”

Barrus is impressed by how he handles his schedule. “He’s a very busy person but doesn’t make me wonder about it very much because he handles it so well.”

Miltenberger thinks that he can do more than a lot of people. “He wants to be as active as he possibly can.”

For Alex, there is not a goal at the end of the day for him. He says, “There’s always going to be something.”

Being on the city council and a first-year adviser at Morningside College, Alex Watters will always have something going on for the next four years. But Alex hasn’t decided yet if he wants to go for reelection in the next city council election. He said, “That’s a bit too early to know and who knows what the future holds.”