Presidential perspectives

Hello, Carnegie Mellon. In case you don’t know who I am, my name is Sean, and I’m the new student body president. After three elections and a little extra debate on the side, I am happy to finally get cracking on the reforms mentioned in my campaign, which are the CMU 5 (shameless plug: www.cmu5.com).

Every past student body president has written the Presidential Perspectives column weekly in The Tartan, and I’m happy to continue that tradition. However, one of the changes I’m planning on instituting is that if I don’t have anything relevant to tell the campus, I’ll at least try my best to make the column funny. If you’re like me, you may have paid attention to the Perspectives on occasion, but mostly just skipped to Crime and Incident instead because it is often times more amusing. Maybe now you won’t. Not that there’s anything funny about crime... or incident.

Basically, here’s how it’s going to work: If the world is about to blow up, and I somehow know about it before you do, I will be very serious and elaborate on how to properly duck, tuck, and roll, or how to climb under your desk while making sure your head is safely protected from flying glass, ceiling tiles, and mechanical pencils. If there’s nothing that you should really be concerned about, I will find the best clean joke or story I can and write it out.

This week, I’m going to be serious about my desire to engage in conversations with everyone who has ever thought about anything that could make Carnegie Mellon a cooler or better place. I don’t care if your idea involves instituting a bass fishing trip for all first-years — I want to hear it. Because my vice president, Adi Jain, and I are only two people, we can only get 48 hours out of a day. Realizing this, we see that we may not be the best champions for all of the ideas we want to promote because of our time constraints. This is why we hope that you, the one with the idea, will help us. If you’re willing to put the effort forward to make the idea a reality, Adi and I promise that we will fight for those ideas when we meet with people like Jennifer Church, Michael Murphy, Indira Nair, Jared Cohon, and others.

Adi and I do not believe that because we hold the positions of student body vice president and president, respectively, that we are the only ones responsible or able to make change at Carnegie Mellon. The burden to make this place better falls on all of our shoulders, and we will all reap the rewards.