It was slightly disappointing when the results came in and revealed that I lost the student council election to the same 3 people who have sat on the council for the past 2 years. Granted they have experience and are qualified, but the way the electoral process is organized is flawed. The school should place a limit on the total years that a person can serve on the student council and have previous members compete for a certain number of spots reserved for them and reserving the majority of seats for new-comes. The school should also increase the number of student council positions in each grade as I believe that 3 is too few especially when each grade have student populations in the hundreds.
Despite the inherent flaws in the system, the process of running for student council has been very fruitful. I learnt how to engage better with my peers and listen to their problems by distributing a survey that allowed them to voice their concerns. I based my campaign platform off of these responses. I attempted to appeal to the majority of voters through this and any other problems that I have observed including online students not being sufficiently engaged. My recorded interview also developed my improvisation and speaking skills as I had to spontaneously come up with adequate answers to big questions. My speech-writing and public-speaking skills were also developed when writing my candidate speech for Student council. I had to figure out a way to keep my audience engaged and interested in my speech so I used powerful and persuasive language to convey the urgency of what I am proposing to fix.
One thing I learnt is to check my facts. Apparentely, my claims about online students being insufficiently engaged are false in the eyes of Diana Yacou. She admits that every system can use improvements, despite my list of suggestions in my speech, but felt that my claims were exaggerated as non-online students have tried to include their online counterparts in discussions and teachers meet weekly with each online students.