By Eden van der Moere
The AAC has shocked (and confused) friend and foe when they announced their board’s structure will be changed completely. Today I sit down with Irina Scheer, who is running for the newly formed Program Advisory Committee.
Can you introduce yourself?
I’m Irina Scheer, I’m 19 years old and I’m from Zutphen. I’m a second year student and I’m currently pursuing an interdepartmental major, focusing on psychology, life science and cognitive science.
What position are you running for?
I’m running for the Program Advisory Committee. At the moment, it looks like there are two positions open in the Program Advisory Committee and there’s been a lot of change in the AAC board and in its structure, but this is the situation right now. The Program Advisory Committee is basically looking into the quality of the courses that UCR offers and the evaluations of those, and then try to make the quality as high as possible. Then it should be easier to get into master programs or getting a good job later on.
Why are you running for this board specifically?
Well, we’re here for education, right? Academics is what I’ve always been interested in and the Program Advisory Committee is kind of a new thing, because then you can shape it in a way. I think that’s really nice, because then we can finally have a voice in this. We used to have one with the AAC, but now we can finally really use our voice. Now we can participate in the quality of our curriculum. For me, that’s very motivational. Also because it’s the first year I want to make sure it’s shaped in a nice way and I would love to be a part of that and contribute to that.
Why should people vote for you specifically?
I have this idea that education is very important for us, because we are going to be the “innovators” of the world after we graduate. We are the ones storming the job markets and therefore education is very important. I now assist those working on the Alumni Survey and we look into people’s careers after they graduated UCR; what did they think were nice courses and what courses did they not like. So I already have a background in this, and I really saw that we really don’t always listen to what UCR alumni are saying. The same with course evaluations, of course half of those are listened to, but maybe the other half isn’t. I have noticed we don’t really listen to it and I think it’s important that we do.
I’m just very motivated to carry out this responsible position. I think I can keep a good overview. Also, for me, if I’m very passionate about something I will invest a lot of my time into that. Since this is a new committee and there are still opportunities to shape it, I think it’s very important that you have people that try to put as much effort as possible into it.
If you were a Beauty and the Beast character, who would you be?
Oh god! That’s a good question… so you have the candlestick, right? And you have the clock… it’s been a very long since I’ve seen this movie! Basically, I have two sides: either I’m very focused in a way, but I also really enjoy certain things and am very optimistic. The clock, is just a little stricter, and I think in some cases that is very good, because you have to realize what is possible and what is not. Of course, that can sometimes be a bit annoying, but I’m a person who likes to stick to the rules and not do something that is not allowed. And I think Lumière, the candlestick, is kind of my other side, as I’m just generally very positive about ideas in life. But I think in this case, I would have the tendency to be Cogsworth.
Eden van der Moere, Class of 2017, is a literature, linguistics and theatre & media studies major from Goes, the Netherlands.
