Student Council Opens Academic Year With Revamped Committees

Student Council on Tuesday kicked off its 2013-2014 academic year with a series of changes to its committees.Student Activities Commission, which last year hosted various events such as Late Night Bowling and Speed Dating, was merged with Recreations Committee.  Technology Committee was reinstituted as Technology Commission and Dining Services Committee was newly instituted at Tuesday’s meeting, both by majority vote.  In addition, the process for getting on committees has been changed to an application process.The application process for committees was implemented this year because Council believed that dedication is the key ingredient to efficiency.“The goal of the new application process is to increase the dedication of our members,” Secretary Benj Cohen said. “Being on a committee is where most things happen at StuCo and we need to make sure that all of the members are completely dedicated.  This way, people are more likely to accomplish the committee’s goals and to work hard for the committee.”SAC, now merged with Recreations Committee, will continue to host events and entertainment for students.  “SAC and Recreations Committee were basically two organizations working with the Student Activities Office on two different things; but essentially, they were doing the same things,” President Alice Ju said. “It was inefficient for two committees to be doing the same jobs, so for the sake of inefficiency, we merged SAC with Recreations Committee.  The now merged Recreations Committee will be taking care of the pep rally and student events, as always.”Technology Committee was reinstituted as Technology Commission for flexibility reasons.  “The reinstitution is just a technical structural change.  It makes Tech Commission more flexible; it allows us to free-float between committees, which is necessary especially for Public Relations and Services,” Technology Commission head Tyler Weitzman ’14 said. “Tech commission can now be more technical, and can work with PR on posting announcements and Minutes on Exeter Connect while working with Services members on wireless printing.”According to Weitzman, Technology Commission plans to maintain, upgrade, and implement new utilities to aid StuCo in its mission to represent the students and better their lives – whether by directly helping students with technology or by making StuCo's job easier with technology. Impending plans include transition to electronic voting and continuing to work with Informational Technology Services (ITS) to implement wireless printing on campus.“As for the electronic voting, the new elections software gets rid of paper ballots. When students come to vote in Agora, they would first check in with the elections committee member manning the booth,” Weitzman said. “There would be three or four laptop “booths,” and students would be told which booth number to go to for voting, where the student would get a display of all the candidates running with their candidate statements. They thus select who to vote for in Agora on the computer.”Dining Services Committee was newly instituted to work with Dining Services for better and healthier menus, by majority vote of the Council.“We want to spend a lot of StuCo energy on improving the food on campus and working with dining services,” Cohen said. “They're really willing to work with us, and we thought it was important to have a committee to work with Dining Services and to give them feedback that they themselves want. “Dining Services has already undergone some improvement from last year.  Director of Dining Services Ward Ganger has taken initiative to start his fresh fish project, according to Cohen.“So how it will work is, Mr. Ganger will get a call from the local fish market about fish caught that day.  And depending on Dining Services’ decision, we could eat at D-hall today some local fish that was caught yesterday,” Cohen said.Cohen attributed the many changes to Council’s desire to better serve the student body.“Making changes to the committees was just about making the many small changes to increase our efficiency and accomplish more for the student body,” he said.  “Last year was a successful year, but our goal for every year is to become better and more efficient, and these committee changes are just one way for us to fulfill this goal.”