The Harvard Extension Student Association

HESA, the Harvard Extension Student Association, ostensibly exists to provide some measure of community to the Extension School population.

From the website:

Our Mission is to build and maintain a sense of community among our students. In partnership with many other organizations on campus, we provide a variety of social and educational events and forums that will enrich your life and your experience here at Harvard.

This past year has really been a great year for HESA.  Our outgoing president, Carlos De La Rosa, did his best to bring a sense of purpose and professionalism to the job.  He and his team managed to get some policies changed, sponsor some interesting and successful events, and generally elevate the operation and standing of what was (in my opinion) a pretty poorly run organization.

To give you an idea of just how poorly it functioned, until Carlos took over, there were few if any regular communications with the community, a website that was infrequently updated, and few other signs of life.  My take was that being the HESA president looked good on a resume and tended to draw those who were looking to punch a ticket rather than drive any meaningful positive change.

This year we actually had some fundraising activity, some well run events that were of particular interest to the broader Extension community, and a website that was actually designed to communicate.

Now that Carlos’ term is over, we have a new president, Ashley Pollack, who won in a landslide victory over her opponents.  Her candidacy was certainly buoyed by the endorsement of Carlos on the popular extensionstudent.com web forum.  My hope is that she continues the example set by Carlos and drives the organization to better serve the interests of the population at large.

But I have two concerns and I’d like to air them here:

• When Carlos took office, he had a roster of candidates that supported his efforts and ran as a part of his campaign.  In essence, we got a team of people instead of just Carlos.  As far as I can tell, Ashley is running alone.  There has been little mention of who she plans to add to her team to achieve her objectives.  If there is anything truer in politics, it’s that the job is often a lot bigger of a headache than it’s worth.  Getting things done is a lot easier if you have help.
• While Carlos did a better job of communicating with students, there was little attention paid to those of us who can’t attend on-campus functions because of distance or scheduling.  Promised video of events never made it to the HESA website and there is little explanation for the delay or absence.  Since distance education is a big part of the program’s attractiveness, there has to be some way to include those of us in far off locales.  I made several suggestions to other HESA groups to embrace simple tools like audio teleconferencing as a means to share a meeting beyond the campus but nothing ever came of that suggestion.

I’m hopeful that this upcoming year will be a successful one for HESA.  It’s my last year as an Extension student and I’d like to see us moving forward as a collective whole with some sense of community than as the disconnected islands of interest that we are largely today.  For what it’s worth, extensionstudent.com really is home to a large and vocal part of the student population.  It’s a large community that has grown organically over the past year and it shows no signs of slowing down.  In many ways, it’s succeeded where HESA has not.

I wish Ashley well.  If I ever get the chance to, I’ll tell her these things myself.  I just hope she’s willing to work with me to make HESA a better and more complete representation of the entire student body.