This is my exit piece.
I have had the honor of serving as Student Council Executive Board President for the past year. I have witnessed things that have made my love for the school deepen tremendously and yet also witnessed things that have made me disgusted and question my commitment to the school. On the whole, the past year has been an amazing experience from which I hope everyone has benefited.
I am proud of what our Council has accomplished this year. While the work of a select few certainly outweighs the work of others, as a whole our Council was focused and goal-oriented. Rather than bemoan the barriers that one inevitably runs into while trying to make drastic changes, we embraced the opportunity presented to us as student leaders and took initiative to ensure we reached our goals.
The new, secure, online voting system was developed over the summer in preparation for the fall freshman class elections. In the first few weeks of school, the Council was focused on the E-Level party. We worked to organize a comedy event on campus on our own in the fall as well as cosponsor the VH1 Best Week Ever event with the Hopkins Organization for Programming. Each of these ended up being tremendously successful.
There are certain areas in which we were unsuccessful. I promised that we would work to develop a StuCo Web site which would be a one-stop shopping experience for all students. While the JHPortal has been launched, it was not truly a StuCo effort nor is it yet what we said it would be. I also promised that we would bring the Spring Fair food vendors each weekend throughout the year, which also didn't happen. I also think we were unsuccessful on the marketing front.
Whenever you come upon a position of leadership, you open yourself up to criticism and blame. That is not a bad thing, however. Leadership means that you are responsible. I have made a concerted effort to ensure that our Council has been united, so that we win together and lose together. As American screenwriter Aaron Sorkin once said, "Defeats are softened and victories sweetened because we did them together."
The one thing that makes me absolutely livid is students' prevailing sense of dissatisfaction with Hopkins. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, Hopkins students are competitive. Yes, Hopkins students spend a lot of time in the library. But Hopkins students are also brilliant. They are trustworthy. They are athletes. They are respectful, caring people. I love the fact that I can leave my laptop, iPod and wallet sitting on a desk at M-Level, go to lunch for two hours, come back and everything is still there. I love the fact that President Brody personally checks and replies to his e-mail every night. I love the fact that on any given evening, I can find an event with a speaker discussing something that I am interested in. We have a tendency to exaggerate the bad and minimize the good. Sometimes this is good because it motivates us to constantly do better. But at the same time, it cannot be at the point where unhappiness is the prevailing emotion.
I am tremendously happy that Laura Hansell is next year's President. She is engaged, thoughtful, brilliant, and without a doubt has the best interests of the school in mind.
I hope that you have felt somewhat of a connection with StuCo this year. I hope that you feel that StuCo, in some way, has made your Hopkins experience better. That, in the end, is the only true measure of success.
--Atin Agarwal is a senior political science and economics major from Monte Sereno, Ca. He is the outgoing president of Student Council.
