Stabenow, who is the first woman senator from Michigan, opened her speech by talking about her childhood seeing politicians almost “inherit” power, with politician’s sons taking every seat. While she was engaged in her community, Stabenow said politics did not seem realistic to her until she was on campus, marching to the Capitol for issues on civil rights and the Vietnam War.

“I found out that if you work hard, you do your homework and if you care, you can actually get things done that affect a lot of people,” Stabenow said in her speech. “If you're willing to be engaged, you can make a difference.”

She said since then, she has seen change with adding the perspective of women into government, with nine female senators in 2001. She cited the changes Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made after the shooting on campus, putting gun reform into Michigan legislation.

Stabenow said that in the wake of the shooting, she was not sure what to say about “the fact that there's not the political will to ban assault weapons.”

“It has to happen sooner or later, and it will take another election and putting people in that will do it, but it's got to happen," Stabenow said.

Within her last year in the Senate, Stabenow, the chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said she wants to continue her work on the farm bill. This package of legislation is reauthorized every five years working with providing support for commodity crop farmers and funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly called SNAP or Food Stamps.

Stabenow said she will also be focused on that as well as Great Lakes conservation efforts.

Associated Students of Michigan State University President and social relations and policy senior Jo Kovach spent time with Stabenow after the lunch. Kovach said the two discussed increased federal grants for the Big 10 Coalition, the student governments behind the Big 10 schools, for increasing safety on college campuses which was emphasized by the shooting at MSU. Kovach wants to make safety infrastructure standardized among college campuses.

“We don't have time to wait,” Kovach said. “We can’t wait for Democrats and Republicans to fight about what the solution is the whole time, but the real thing is a lot of our campuses in Michigan don't have locks on their doors or don't have the infrastructure we have to lock down buildings with MSU lD cards.”

Kovach said the college campus safety cannot be put on the back burner, especially for colleges in states that are not putting common sense gun laws into their legislation. It is easy for state legislatures to switch legislative power and lose the ability to make gun reform, according to Kovach, emphasizing the importance of talking to Stabenow about enshrining those safety precautions and infrastructure on college campuses nationwide.

Throughout the lunch, Stabenow answered questions from the students about her efforts with the Ukraine war, democratic backsliding and the importance of agriculture in the state. She thanked the students for their questions, saying it was important that students at MSU increase the student voting percentages.