Student Council officially marked the transition of its administration in the Rotunda's Dome Room last night.
"I'm really excited," President Colin Hood said. "I think we have a great year ahead of us. I think this group last year did a great job. We built a lot of relationships across the University with different student groups that are really going to lead us toward good things that we really want to do over the next year."
Council also announced the names of its new executive board. Third-year College student Aagya Mathur, former Student Life Committee Co-Chair, will assume the role of chief of cabinet. Second-year Commerce student Alan Rogers will be chief financial officer, while second-year Engineering student Kate McDowell will be chief technological officer and second-year College student Dan Morrison was appointed director of University relations.
Former Council President John Nelson also expressed confidence in the potential of the new leaders of the organization.
"I have so much faith and so much enthusiasm with what the new group is going to do," Nelson said. "It's really a stellar group of individuals."
Nikhil Panda, former vice president of administration, also noted that Council broke ground on many of its efforts this year and doubled its membership.
"Over the course of eight months we put out 120 initiatives, which is absolutely incredible," Panda said. "The next administration has plenty of things they can keep working on. There are lots of programs that they can turn over and do again next year."
Nelson added that these initiatives were the result of diligent work from members within Student Council rather than just members of the presidential cabinet.
"That's not just the 20 or 30 leaders of Student Council - that's the 300 members of Student Council that play such a critical role in all of that we do," Nelson said. "In many ways those committee members that ... are the foundation of what we do."
Panda also reflected positively on the past year.
"We talked about all the external things Student Council has done for the University community, and thinking about what each individual has done to serve their peers, but we don't really talk a lot about the internal aspects of Council," Panda said. "We've definitely come a long way as a group. None of this would be possible without the efforts of every single person here."
Hood also hopes his administration will have more presence on Grounds and will do more to reach out to contracted independent organizations through face-to-face interactions through members of the representative body by allowing contracted independent organizations to request to speak and meet with a representative.
"One of our big goals is transparency and outreach," Hood said. "The representatives are running outreach - that's never happened before. They're doing outreach and they're speaking to CIOs."\nHood also plans a big recruitment push in the fall, particularly targeting first-year students.
"We're going to do some big Meet Your Council events in the fall," Hood said. "The goal is to start fresh in the fall especially with first-years. I would like opening weekend to be a big event - hopefully centralized after Convocation."
The new representative body will vote on a bill to approve the remaining members of the presidential cabinet at its first meeting next Tuesday.
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