Jason Marion might be the busiest student at Ohio State. In fact, some say he’s busier than OSU President E. Gordon Gee.
“A lot of us joke that he keeps a schedule that would rival Gee’s,” said Peter Koltak, a Lantern reporter and former Undergraduate Student Government president. “I can’t figure out how he’s possibly doing it and being a student.”
Along with his job representing graduate and professional students on the OSU Board of Trustees, Marion, the former president of the Council of Graduate Students, is pursuing a doctorate in public health. He spent last summer surveying Ohio’s beaches and water bodies for his research.
Outside of school, he works for the Ohio State Parks East Fork region, helps out with wildland firefighting, and has been “Smokey the Bear” at the Ohio State Fair for the past several years.
“The juggling of all of those things — the man divides his time,” said David Frantz, secretary of the OSU Board of Trustees. “I don’t know when he sleeps. I don’t know when he does it all.”
But Marion finds fault with the comparison to Gee, after all, Marion “makes a lot less money than Gee,” he jokes.
“I have a bad habit of over-committing myself, and after I reflect upon it, I think I have to slow down,” Marion said. “But then I think why — you only have so much time allotted and you might as well do what you can do with it.”
Marion has never slowed down in his time at OSU, even when he faced lymphoma during his third year. He continued with his duties as president of the Council of Graduate Students and as a student trustee.
“That was the year I secured the grant and fellowships and got appointed trustee,” Marion said. “It was actually one of the best years of my life, minus the [cancer]. But it kept me focused at least. That was a hell of a year.”
Marion said if he had been older, he doesn’t think he would have been able to continue with all of his activities as he did.
“There were days where my knees and legs hurt, and public speaking was tough,” Marion said. “You’d lean on the podium and take a nap on the floor of the office later or something.”
September 2008 was the last time Marion’s cancer showed up in scans, and he stopped chemotherapy and radiation treatments in January 2009.
“As of this fall I had my last scan and everything looked good. But you never know. It could come back,” Marion said. “There are lots of people who obsess over it, but if it comes back it comes back. It makes you tough. It’s a pain in the ass, but it can be a blessing as well, and it teaches you to reflect on how precious life is, even at a young age.”
As a student trustee, Marion has served as a member of the academic affairs and student life committee, the fiscal affairs committee, the committee on trusteeship, and the agricultural affairs committee.
“He does all the reading,” Frantz said. “The board gets reading this thick before meetings, and he reads it, and he absorbs it. He is meticulous in his work.”
Although student trustees do not have a vote, they do participate in all board activities, including executive sessions.
“What is really important then though is their ability to speak, and listen, and make their voice heard, and be respected,” Franz said. “Jason fulfills that part superbly. Every issue, whether it is at the state level or with the university, he pays attention to what’s going on.”
For the past three years, OSU has not increased undergraduate tuition, and Marion says that’s a significant step by the university.
“Keeping tuition for undergraduates flat is great,” Marion said. “The university has been having to cut back in areas that we don’t feel as students. They’ve done a good job, even on the graduate side. The tuition hasn’t been held flat there, but the increases have been modest. They haven’t been double-digit percent increases.”
Koltak worked with Marion while each was president of their respective student governments, and often went to him for advice.
“Jason has an incredible knowledge of policy,” Koltak said. “He’s a logical thinker. I would go to him to bounce ideas, even if the issue was related to undergrad. He has such a handle on the student experience.”
Originally from Batavia, Ohio, Marion kept a busy schedule even as an undergraduate at Hocking College and at Morehead State University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and a master’s in biology from Morehead State. Besides being in a fraternity and serving as student body president for two terms, Marion was chair of the Kentucky Board of Student Body Presidents.
At Morehead his group advocated for an additional $50 million in higher education funding and began the process of constructing a new recreation facility.
He chose OSU after the university developed its public health college. The day before he started class at OSU, Marion volunteered to help with undergraduate convocation, because he had never experienced it.
“I just help out. I don’t plan it. I just show up to things,” Marion said. “If there’s something going on at OSU, I’m usually there, or try to be if my time allows me.”
Marion’s achievements have earned him awards from the Ohio Union, include the Spirit of Ohio State award and the Outstanding Graduate Student award.
When he has time for social activities, Marion said he enjoys going to Cincinnati Reds games and concerts, but says that “you do what you have time to do.”
“If I have dead time in my schedule, I go home and watch whatever I’ve DVR-ed, which is a lot of ‘Adult Swim,'” Marion said. “If I watch that, it can go on for two, three or four hours, so you know, if I don’t have activities planned then I don’t use my time wisely. But my fraternity is about being a balanced man, so a little bit of ‘Aqua Teen’ isn’t going to hurt. But if I don’t budget time in my life, then that time’s shot.”
Marion’s research as a doctoral student focuses on studying water quality in Ohio bodies of water and evaluating their safety. Marion has grants from the Ohio Water Development Authority and Public Health Preparedness for Infectious Diseases.
“We should be able to model this and … factor all of these things in together, and then forecast potentially whether it’s safe for people to swim,” Marion said, “and that would be a recommendation on when to put an advisory sign up or not.”
Marion collected the majority of his data last summer, and was accepted to present his research at the International Water Research Conference in Portugal in the spring.
As far as his future, Marion is choosing between becoming a faculty member at a university on graduation and being an environmental health officer in the U.S. Navy.
“I’d be happy to get out of the academic world for four years or so because I’ve been in it for so long,” Marion said. “I’ve been leaning pretty hard towards the Navy side.”
As Marion finishes up his degree and finishes up his term as a graduate student trustee, he said OSU has been very good to him.
“Being a graduate student at Ohio State was one of the best decisions of my life,” Marion said. “It’s one of the most, if not the most, well-known universities in the world, and every morning when you get up you should think about that if you’re at Ohio State. There are so many people who would love to be in our shoes, and we need to be appreciative of that.”
