Fresh faces

If you were to go out and ask all the freshers arriving at York what they expected from their first year, you would probably find out two things. Firstly, that you have far too much time on your hands and secondly, that amongst all the activities those incoming freshers want to spend their time doing, ‘getting involved in student politics’ was not high on the list.

I’d be surprised if it was even on the list at all. I can even bet that some of the freshers that are reading this will instantly think that I’m just trying to recruit you into more work and hassle or that I’m going to regurgitate the usual rant of how students are too apathetic nowadays. But you’d be wrong. Rather, I’m simply here to inform you. Because whether you like it or not, student politics will find you somewhere around campus. I promise it will. Don’t believe me, freshers? Well let’s have a look. Most of you will have bought a college Freshers’ Week/Fortnight ticket. While all of these are similar in the fact that they concern endless socialising and ice-breakers, they are all run by your respective Junior College Room Committees or JCRCs (the students that help run the college). They organise your Freshers’ Week and all the college events that happen throughout the year as well as your college merchandise, welfare and sports teams.

Sooner or later, you may start to notice imperfections and problems with what they’re doing. When you do it’s those of you who get involved in your college politics that will help change things. So, if your Freshers’ Week seems more suitable for an old people’s home and if you have to wait half the year for the college hoodie you ordered, well then there’s only really one thing you can do: pick up the mantle and stand for an election to your JCRC. Even when you join a society, you will have to be voted in if you want to become more involved. You’ll have to stand up in front of everyone and think up what you’ll bring to the position, when all you really want to say is: ‘I’d like to help out more’. You’ll hear about student politics whenever YUSU puts on some eye-wateringly expensive event that completely flops or when someone proposes a motion to change the name of a building to something more humorous (watch out for the Brian Blessed Study Centre in Heslington).

And this is all before I even start on YUSU and NUS elections. So you’ll soon see that there is little you do on campus that does not somehow involve a sprinkling of politics. Within a few months your halls will be littered with hundreds of different posters telling you to vote for some lunatic who thought he could get votes by photoshopping his head on E.T. Of course, the choice of how involved you get is completely up to you, but student politics can be a great way to make new friends and make a positive difference. Whether it’s running for a position in your JCRC, in a specific society or even in YUSU, I would highly recommend putting it on your list of things to do this year.