Zach Eastman's Thoughts on Being Student Governor

Hi, my name's Zach Eastman, I'm the student rep on the Durham College Board of Governors, and I'm in the Business Administration program at Durham College. I originally heard about the governor position when I started on campus. There was a poster up in the hall and I wanted to get involved in some way; I wasn't really too sure about what the Board of Governors position was, so I did a little bit of research on the website and it seemed like a great opportunity, so I applied for it. The Board of Governors is the governing body for Durham College, so you, along with 12 external members and 3 other internal members, are in charge of things like: the strategic plan, the finances of the college, adding and deleting new programs, approving them, and basically making sure the college runs efficiently and all the government policies are followed. It's been a great experience, especially because I'm in a business program. It's really letting me see the aspect of basically running a business from the real world. The experience that you get on it, especially with the external members coming from every field – from law, to finance, to politics – the networking opportunities that you have meeting those people are fantastic. First thing is, you go to the Durham College website and search “Board of Governors”. You'll see a link to print out nomination papers. You get a couple of your fellow students to nominate you, as soon as they do that you can hand in the papers at the president's office and then go out and start campaigning. I mean, encourage your friends to vote for you, encourage other members in the class to get involved, because you definitely want a strong voice on the board, and we want the best candidate to represent the students. It's important to have a strong turn-out for this because you want to have the best candidate and you want to have the most representative candidate, so the more people that vote, the better.