Dear Harvard University Extension School Students,
It is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that I welcome you to the Harvard Extension School (HES) as we celebrate our Centennial year. We are very privileged to be here at a most auspicious moment in history when Harvard University will be honoring us and our place within the Harvard Community; and this year’s Harvard Extension Student Association (HESA) is uniquely positioned to play a significant supporting role. I am excited at the opportunity to serve as your President of HESA and I will do my best to discharge the duties of the office to the best of my abilities.
My vision, in a nutshell, is to make HESA a first-class student association capable of delivering the most sophisticated platform for social cohesion, supplemental educational pursuits and other enriching experiences, and to take HESA to the next level of success by:
- Improving processes and systems internally
- Increasing turnout at events
- Maintaining and improving our Harvard University inter-school profile
- Creating a sustainable and functional organizational structure
- Enhancing our credibility with all stakeholders
- Taking a social entrepreneurship approach
One of my main objectives this year is to increase our “bandwidth” or “capacity for work” as a student association. Much intellectual capital has been spent to identify this as one of the most important root issues facing HESA. Due to lack of adequate student involvement, a dependence on too few students to get things done and insufficient attention to building the organizational capabilities required, HESA has traditionally been able to focus primarily on one or two main things at a time each year. This results in leaving certain constituents under-served or not served altogether. For instance, some students want HESA to focus on at least one of the following: a) more social events, b) more policy recommendations to the administration, c) better and more timely communications and updated website, d) better and more clubs, e) better marketing of our student activities, f) more academically-oriented or educationally enriching events g) more representation of individual student concerns, h) more inter-school activity, i) a better-ran student government overall, etc. I see my job as president to serve all of these interests over the next year as much as is humanly possible since these are things that a properly functioning student association should be able to.
How do I propose to do this?
By enacting a comprehensive organizational restructuring, recruiting more students to be involved to fill staffing needs, building a teamwork environment that engenders a high performance culture, executing a tight tactical and strategic roll-out plan that pays attention to realistic multi-tiered timetables over a period of several months, and building a measure of flexibility into the plan so that adaptation, tweaking and feedback can be incorporated as it unfolds. Although I will be describing more of my vision over the upcoming weeks and months, I wanted to briefly introduce some of my more specific goals for the year.
- To start a student club leaders training workshop that will facilitate leadership development and training for current student club leaders, students wanting to become club leaders and for students wanting to be involved in HESA.
- To form a policy committee that will, among other things, represent student interests and concerns to the administration and review the constitution & bylaws for improvement.
- To institute an ethics pledge ensuring that officers of HESA observe the highest ethical and moral conduct and that a positive culture for teamwork is developed.
- To re-introduce open board meetings for transparency and accessibility reasons.
- To establish a communications department that will ensure timely updates are sent by email and posted on the website.
- To establish a technology department that will improve the website making it more useful, functional and interactive.
- To establish for the first-time a distance education liaison position on the board of HESA as a step towards representing distance education students and providing opportunities for more integration of the distance education community into student life at HES and at Harvard as a whole.
- To increase community participation by making events more stimulating and enriching and by fostering more inter-school initiatives.
- To form a fund-raising & development committee that will enable HESA to fund these initiatives by at least doubling our current budget of $15,000.
Some of this, it will be said, seems rather ambitious. Yet much of these goals, among others, are part of what should already “be” within a properly functioning student association. I plan to make the case that these objectives, once effectively executed, will permanently strengthen HESA’s organizational capabilities and set in motion a model for the future that will result in much improvement to the Harvard experience for thousands of Extension students. Any leader that takes on the kind of sweeping change that I propose will encounter some inertia at first. I will not pretend that this will be easy but it is a worthwhile cause that I am willing to “roll-up my sleeves and fight for.” I ask for your support and contribution wherever possible. It has been the observation of some that Extension students, though largely non-traditional, are some of the most experienced, seasoned and valuable assets to Harvard University as a whole. If we come together and contribute our varied skills and strengths to improve our student association and student life, we will, among other things, gain more credibility to influence the policies and direction of the Extension school and thus effectuate a positive impact that will redound to our benefit both in the short term as students as well as in the long term as alumni. There is still room for more volunteers to participate, so I hope that you will consider joining our efforts. Please email us at hesaboard@gmail.com.
For those who are new students, a little about me: I come to the office equipped with tools from the fields of strategy consulting, marketing management and venture capital, armed with an MBA (in marketing) and Msc in Finance (in corporate financial management) and a BA in Theology (with a focus on epistemological hermeneutics & philosophical logic). I also come with unique insight into how things work at HESA and HES, having been the VP of HESA and having been the founding President of a student club for the past two years. I also come with a track record of ground-breaking success with the “Negotiation and Leadership Conference”, that found resonance with hundreds of students over a span of two years. Similarly, I have put together an executive board whose HESA experience together is formidable:
- Vice President: Ram Dhan was VP of HESA for the 2008-2009 administration and has been actively involved in developing the HEBS student club.
- Treasurer: Amy Szczygiel is returning for her third year as the Treasurer for HESA, serving consecutively for two previous administrations.
- Secretary: Kristin Sarkisian was VP of HESA for the 2006-2007 administration.
For more on our background, see the Administration page. I will be announcing more non-executive board appointments in the weeks to come as part of an organizational restructuring endeavor. Please check our website, which is in the process of being revamped, over the upcoming days and weeks for general updates, board meeting calendar and events. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at president@hesa.dce.harvard.edu.
I look forward to meeting and hearing from many of you over the coming year.
Best regards,
Andre Bisasor – HESA President 2009-2010
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