Election Time! (Nov. 29-Dec. 11)

Jumping right back into the middle of things, Monday went fairly well overall...it was really cool to visit the castle turret and I survived my IOP. The remainder of the next two weeks really flew by. On Wednesday evening, we held the final election for Student Council. The way that Student Council works at UWC is very different from CA [Cary Academy]. There are 10 members on Student Council, two sets of 5. Either "set" of 5 is on a separate track that depends on when you are elected. There are two Student Council elections each year--1 in December and another in April. At each election, 5 new students are elected onto the council. Those first-years serve exactly 1 year on the council, before being replaced by a new set of first-years the following year. Basically, the student council in 1st semester is composed entirely of second-years, 5 who were elected the previous December, and then 5 who were elected in April. In December, an election is held to replace 5 of the second years. It was this election that I participated in.

To further complicate the process, the race for the 5 seats is not a straight race--each seat is reserved for a specific region. The North Americans get one seat, the Europeans another, the Africans, and so on and so forth. Of course, this division isn't perfect--there are more North Americans than any other region. All the same, I ran as a North American, given it's the region I'm representing. The first thing that happens in the election process is the nominations. Anyone can nominate any first-year to run representing their region. Of course, no surprise, usually the majority of the first-year class is nominated. The next step is a questionnaire that any nominated candidate can fill out. This stage usually narrows the field of candidates, though, no surprise over 17 of the 27 North Americans chose to run. After the questionnaires were posted for a few days, the first round of votes was held. In this round, three people from each region was picked to continue to the next round. Believe me, it was a nerve-wracking few hours while I waited for the results to come out. Rather fortunately, I was picked to continue on to the next round.The next round contained speeches--each candidate was expected to give a 2 minute speech, followed by two 90 second questions. I was running against two equally competent and impressive people. All of the speeches went really well. My speech was pretty fluent, and most people seemed to like it. After the speeches, another couple of days passed before the actual, final election. On election night, I was on edge! It was really nerve-wracking. When the final result came down the line, I was rather happy. I had been elected to Student Council.

Needless to say, my election to the Council put me in a rather good mood for the remaining week and a half. Although I was very busy for the final week, it just seemed to fly by! Before I knew it, I was flying home. In my next post, I'll start talking about my second semester at UWC!