The second Student Council meeting this school year took place October 1 in room 104. It began with Anthony Tucker presenting the Tanzania project in cooperation with Bus4Africa, which was initially rejected by Anglo-American University. Tucker is now raising support for the project through a petition as it is well organized and presents an unique opportunity for students and the entire university for many reasons. The petition is now online. Student council members seem eager to support and promote the project.
After the project presentation a potential new Student Council member, Patrick Engels was introduced. Engels said he previously studied medicine at Charles University and missed the ability to participate more in school happenings.
“They basically wanted us foreign students for money,” Engels explained. Charles University was not helpful in other ways either, as he said they, “Clearly didn’t want the foreign students to pass the exams.” This year is his first at AAU and he hopes to have a say in what is “going on at school” and in the faculty. Vendula Zenata, the student council secretary, did not seem too convinced as she asked him whether he would, “want to join immediately or maybe see what it’s about and change his mind?… I mean, it might be some work…” which arose laughter in the room. “It might actually be a lot of work,” she said.
She was unsure of Engels’ determination to commit to the council, to which Honza Vicher, the council’s treasurer, stated “You can always resign, you know.” The student council will likely vote on the decision next week.
After that the members began to go through the council constitution and started with the changes proposed by student council adviser Daniel Padolsky. Zenata and Radovan Fafilek, the council’s vice president, had different opinions on the process of going through changes, with Fafilek’s suggesting to, “discuss the basics” due to lack of time being the successful one.
They first started with the minimum required GPA for student council members, deciding that 2.5 is too low, “because it says that it’s ok to do worse while you’re on the SC,” said Padolsky, then almost changing it to 2.8 “We should act like role models,” commented Vicher, and finally deciding to “leave it for next time.”
“We don’t need to decide immediately, we have, like, months.” said Zenata.
The next issue proposed by Zenata was the minimum amount of classes that need to be taken by Student Council members. “But why does it matter?” asked council president Tanya Bechev. Zenata wanted to change the currently required one class, to three classes. Saying, “If [students] only have one class, they don’t know the school well.” Padolsky suggested that there is a difference between graduate and undergraduate classes.
