Hopkins pounds the gavel

Above all else, a session of Student Council feels odd.

If you decide to attend a meeting, or even get involved in student council, an evening with the pack might start a little something like this.

You find yourself in the East Boardroom, a large ornate room with portraits on the walls and a vast table in the center. The chairs look like antiques from an earlier era. The feeling is one of awe and importance.

Sitting around the table are students, often in t-shirts and slacks, all about your age, all discussing the latest campus events, voting on funding requests or asking questions of various campus officials.

It's enough to make your head spin.

Student Council, or StuCo in the campus lingo, oversees many aspects of student life: it oversees student groups, it's the primary point of contact for student-administration relations, and it organizes class-wide events.

StuCo is composed of two separate sets of people: the executive board and the class officials. The executive board includes five students: Charles Reyner, student council president; Katie Davis, vice president for administration; Manu Sharma, vice president for institutional relations; Ben Wardlow, treasurer; and Audrey Pinn, secretary.

StuCo also supervises the decisions of the Student Activities Commission, which is chaired by the executive treasurer of StuCo. The SAC evaluates funding requests and approves the budgets for most of the student groups on campus.

The class officials consist of each class's president, vice president, secretary/treasurer and three representatives. They organize class-wide events and represent the class's interests at StuCo meetings. Events coordinated by class officers in past years included "Senior Week," among others.

Elections for StuCo's freshmen representatives are held in early October, and full elections for the Executive Board are held in early March. Class elections follow about a month afterwards.

Council elections are supervised by the Board of Elections, which operates independently of StuCo. Last year's board was embroiled in controversy as many candidates were disqualified due to what some saw as minor rules violations. Manish Gala, the former StuCo president, said that many sought victory by, "getting their opponent disqualified," according to an analysis of the issue in last year's News-Letter.

Unlike previous elections, students running for the two senior class representative positions in last year were allowed more campaign freedom. Widespread outrage over disqualified candidates led to the final election, which allowed write-in candidates to win with as few as eight votes.

StuCo also was involved in writing the report from the Commission on Undergraduate Education's and the return of meal-equivalency to Levering Hall. Next year, StuCo will participate in the design of the Charles Village Project, a development of retail and housing space in the 3200 block of St. Paul Street.

The largest enemy of StuCo is the student body's perception that StuCo does nothing. Former president Manish Gala echoed this sentiment in an op-ed piece in the News-Letter last year, but said that while some members do little, the council as a whole plays a large role in student life.

The News-Letter lists the names and phone numbers of each Student Council member each week, as well as whether or not they attended that week's meeting.