2024 Council Representative Elections
Responsibilities of a Council Representative
The main responsibility of a Council Representative is to attend monthly General Council Meetings and represent your constituency in all GSC discussions. You can find past agendas, notes, and the schedule for the full 2024-2025 year on this page (requires Touchstone login). Additional responsibilities include participating in GSC committees and activities as possible.
Nominations and Elections Process
See the below table for the available seats for each graduate program at MIT. Only students enrolled in the specific graduate program are eligible to be nominated for these seats (see note below). We will also be electing the 5 at-large seats at this meeting, the constituency for these seats is all graduate students at MIT, and we will follow the process under point 2 below.
- The nominations and elections process for seats with identified appointing bodies will be determined by those bodies. Please contact them directly for further information. All seats appointed by local departmental student governments must be communicated to the GSC VP by Tuesday October 1, 2024 at 11:59pm. (If a seat does not have a listed appointing body but you believe it should, please have a leader of the organization email gsc-vp@mit.edu to sort that out.)
- For seats without identified appointing bodies, the following process applies:
- To be nominated for a council representative seat, a candidate must submit a petition with 20 student signatures (or 20% of the constituency, if lower than 20) to the GSC Vice President. Please send an email to gsc-vp@mit.edu with the subject line “Nomination for [XXX] seat” with a list of Kerberos IDs of the signees of your petition (you can collect signatures however you’d like, we’d recommend a simple Google form such as this one). Signatures must be from members of the constituency, and will be cross-checked against the Registrar’s rolls. All petition signers will also be emailed that their signature was received, to confirm valid signatures. The deadline to submit nominations is Tuesday October 8, 2024 at 11:59pm.
- For seats with more candidates than openings, there will be a ranked-choice election at the GSC General Council Meeting on Wednesday October 9, 2024 at 5:30pm. You may be asked to submit a short statement (200 words) on why you would be a suitable representative. Uncontested nominees will be automatically elected to their seats.
New council representatives will begin their terms on Tuesday October 15, 2024. Vacancies will continue to be advertised and filled on a rolling basis as per the above process, with the deadline for receiving nominations or notification of election as 11:59pm the Friday before the General Council Meeting (next deadline: Friday November 29, 2024)
If you have any questions or concerns about any of this, please email gsc-vp@mit.edu.
Note on cross-departmental students: In cases where graduate students are primarily housed in a department that they are not enrolled in, they may choose to represent either seat. However, the same process above applies, and petition signatures will only be considered valid if the signers are enrolled in the seat that you seek to represent.