Robert College Student Council
A council with a real budget, commercial sponsors and about a thousand students behind it. I climbed it a rung at a time and ended up running it.
The council
Robert College’s student council handles real money. It holds a budget, negotiates with commercial sponsors, represents roughly a thousand students to an administration, and owns most of the events the school year is organised around.
I came up through it a step at a time: level representative from January 2023, vice president from December 2023, then president from April 2024, after the council voted the incumbent out and I succeeded him under a constitution that had to be partly rewritten to permit it. That story is on the About page. What matters here is that by the time the year’s largest event landed on my desk, I had already spent eighteen months learning how the council’s money, calendar and sponsor relationships actually worked.
The Fine Arts Festival
FAF is a Robert College institution and the largest and oldest high-school festival in the country. As president I was head organiser for the 2024 edition: budget, sponsorship, programming, logistics and the few hundred small decisions an outdoor event with live sound runs on.
Numbers
A $50,000 budget, raised across 13 sponsors with FIAT as headline partner. Two professional acts and more than ten amateur groups across the programme.
Sponsorship is the skill from that year I still use. Thirteen sponsors means thirteen separate negotiations with commercial organisations who owe a school nothing, each wanting a different thing in return, all needing to be delivered on the day without the event turning into an advertisement.
The rest of the role
FAF was the largest thing the council did that year but not the only one. The presidency also carried the Spring Ball, the ordinary business of representing roughly a thousand students to the administration, and the address that opens the academic year: welcoming the school community back to campus, with advice for the prep-year students starting at RC for the first time and something to send everyone else into the year with.
I stayed involved after leaving: I am an alumni class representative for RC‘25.