I knew that my Committee is a fantastic one when a more senior member of the Peterhouse Graduate Society – a 4th year PhD student – pulled me aside, noticing the high volume of people hanging-out in the MCR, and asked if there was an official event going on that evening. Surely the assumption was that something had to be scheduled in order to account for the large turnout of merry people. Well, as luck would have it, we weren’t running an event, and, in fact, what he saw was what we usually see in this academical year’s MCR.
Juxtapose this level of participation with the opportunity for a new person to join the Committee as the new First Year Representative, and what you get is the highest number of nominees vying for this position in living memory of the Peterhouse MCR.
Whereas we had only two candidates running for First Year Rep for the past four Committees, we had five candidates this year, and each is as good as his/her competitor. Tonight we held hustings for the position of First Year Rep, and each did a fine job presenting their respective platforms. It's wonderful to be in the presence of such a bunch of well spoken people who care about the community they are a part of. The main problem now is that, come time to vote, we are faced with a hard decision since they are all, hands down, equally qualified to be First Year Rep!
Sadly, only one candidate will win, but I would like to believe that they will all win in the end: even if their bid for first year representative didn’t precipitate a spot on this year’s Committee, what is abundantly clear is that we have a set of very strong candidates for next year’s various positions in the Committee represented the list of nominees for First Year Representative. I'm not worried about the future anymore.
This year, we have developed the reputation of being “that active MCR” in the graduate community. With the high-level of participation from our current membership, I have no doubt that we will continue to inspire future MCR’s to maintain this reputation for years to come. There is a palpable difference in the pulse of the MCR this year. I’m not going to claim that it was easy to get the MCR to becoming what it has become – having a great Committee and having hemorrhaged a fair share of my life force into my work as President and First Year Rep certainly helped – but whenever I sip my espresso in the MCR, I couldn’t help but to smile to myself and feel that I did something right.
