Today we held officer elections! The debates took longer than expected, but they were also much more fun than expected. Dylan even skipped the class that he usually has in order to defend his vice-president position.
The first round of elections was Zuoming Shi (current Treasurer) vs. Cindy Trieu (non-officer), and they were fighting for the presidency. They were both very popular candidates with some great skills to offer. It was a very close race, but Zuoming won by only two votes!
The second battle was for the vice presidency: Dylan Clavell (current vice president) vs. Tyler Wallace (current outreach officer). This was a hard decision for most voters, because as with the race for the presidency, both candidates were very qualified and well-liked. However, Dylan ended up winning with a strong majority, perhaps because when people are undecided, they tend to vote for the incumbent.
There were a few automatic victories for those who ran for positions without facing any competition. Jonathan Wright (also known as Save Point, our current secretary), became the new club treasurer for next year, while Livio De La Cruz (our current president) became the new secretary. Patrick Wilkening remained the club's cinematographer, and Harvey Sam's position as game server admin got reduced to a pseudo-officer position since we don't have a game server anymore.
We were left with one vacancy, however: no one ran for the position of outreach officer. We decided to hold an election for this position during next week's meeting, and the current candidates are William Wilson (non-officer) and Cindy Trieu (non-officer). After she lost the race for presidency by such a small margin, so many people wanted Cindy to be an officer that we went out of our way to convince her to run for this position, which she would actually be a very good fit for, considering her art and graphic design experience. William, on the other hand, also has art experience, and he hopes to use his officer position as an opportunity to really help the club grow and to more effectively use all of its media outlets.
So to recap, here are all of the results:
President - Zuoming Shi
Vice President - Dylan Clavell
Treasurer - Jonathan Wright
Secretary - Livio De La Cruz
Cinematographer - Patrick Wilkening
Outreach Officer - Up for grabs
The officer positions that we voted on are for the next academic year, so the new terms won't start until the Fall semester. Until then, we'll be in a sort of transition period where the new officers can learn from the incumbents about how to perform their job.
Because we were expecting the elections to take much less time, Dylan hastily prepared a pretty interesting talk/discussion on silly games such as QWOP, Enviro-Bear, and Katamari Damacy. It started five minutes before the meeting ended, but it lasted for about 20 minutes. It was actually a really entertaining talk, and the fact that so many people stayed long after the meeting had ended was a sign of how good it was.
During next week's meeting, we'll finish our elections by voting on Outreach Officer, and for the remainder of the meeting, we're going to try out that "book club"-style game discussion idea that was brought up before Spring Break. The topic of the discussion will likely be Team Fortress 2, so if you haven't played the game yet, download it now (it's free!), play it over the weekend, and share your thoughts about it during the meeting. Meanwhile, we'll be doing our research on the game so that we can guide the discussion around interesting topics and hopefully make it more of an educational experience rather than an aimless discussion.
