this is what i have so far:

hahaha. i really wigged out with the symbols and got so abstract that it turned out awful. i mean, i like the scale, but the gear is scribbly for some reason, not to mention the whole design is sort of a wreck. so these were my initial thoughts:  the gear-industrialism, the city; the scale-equality, balance, order; flames-??? looked cool i guess. whlie doing reasearch, i found this and thought the torches looked neat. they also tied in with my infrastructure concept(…3 branch power, each branch with powers overlapping…). i really struggled with the typography. at first i used some gothic type but now i don’t know. maybe a really modernized type would look better. maybe the logo shouldn’t even be in a ’seal’ type format, i just thought that composition looked really distinguished.

overall, it’s been kind of difficult to make a decision about this because i’m not sure of how the infrastructure is going to be set up. the reason why i say that is because i feel like we’re leaning into leftfield and may possibly wind up having a really experimental structure that could give students ideas and turn out really nice, so we should reflect that in the logo, right? at any rate i’m not sure that the logo is an instant priority unless we have a deadline to meet as far as t-shirt designs go. so please comment with any insight you may have and please don’t hold back when critiquing my design. –troy

One of the concerns that was brought up at our last meeting was that there might be an issue with authority or “power trips” if we had a traditional government with a president and so on. I tried to take that into consideration as I thought about how we might structure the government. (However, I think its a bit silly to think that we’re going to somehow avoid problems that have plagued SGA’s since the beginning of time.)

I haven’t gotten in touch other other student governments directly, so my ideas might change after I talk with them specifically about this step in setting up the student government, but here are my initial ideas:
I though the obvious thing to start would to have a representative from each major. Lets call them Senators; there would be 15 of them.

1. baking & pastry
2. culinary arts
3. culinary management
4. digital film & video
5. digital print production
6. fashion design
7. fashion marketing
8. graphic design
9. industrial design
10. interior design
11. media arts & animation
12. photography
13. visual effects
14. visual merchandising
15. web/interactive media

That seems like a lot to me, so I wonder if it would be possible to combine some of the majors.

Baking & Pastry and the Culinary programs would probably have similar interests, and could probably be represented by a single senator. Same for the fashion programs (and perhaps visual merchandising?). That brings us to 10 or 11 Senators, which seems a lot more reasonable. Collectively, what might these senators be called?

A lot of schools also have representatives for different aspects of the schools operations.

At AIPH, we have 3700 students, and only 900 of them live in housing (if my numbers are correct). Even if they’re off though, a significantly larger number of students are commuting than are living on campus. I think it would be wise to give them representation in the government. This person would probably be someone who worked with SEPTA to get discounts to students, and arrange transportation to off-campus events.

I think we also need represenatives with the following responsibilities (though I don’t know what their titles might be):

General Student Activities: Someone who would oversee school activities and events as a whole. I would see this job having a lot of responsibility and very close to what a President might do. This person would work closely with Student Affairs.

Clubs: Someone to work closely with clubs, to give them a central person to help clubs collaborate on events, and to improve awareness of events among the student body.

Public Relations: Someone to work with area schools to throw larger events that might be otherwise outside the scope of either school. This could potentially give us access to better venues for events. (I’m thinking big here).

Thats what I’ve got for now… Updates to come as I speak with other schools.

–Andrew Vrydaghs

Welcome to the AIPH SGA Blog, where we will be able to share and discuss ideas for starting the student goverment. As a first post, I will discuss some options for the operation and maintenance of this Blog.

For simplicity sake, I suggest that initially, we all use this same login to make posts and comments. So long as we do that though, it is imperative that we sign our posts so that we know who is saying what is being said.

As we get moving, it would be better for us all to have our own wordpress login name (if you want to do that now, thats fine, but you’ll have to let me know so that I can give you posting privileges).

Thats all for now. If you have any questions or trouble, you can email me at andyjv@gmail.com.

–Andrew Vrydaghs

P.S. Create a Word Press Login Name here: http://wordpress.com/signup/