Fun fact about me: All The President’s Men is one of my favorite movies. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. NOW.

Unsurprising. It’s “the movie that send thousands of kids to journalism school.” But it’s also about one of my favorite things: elections.

I’m a political junkie. Part of its that I’m an aspiring political journalist, but part of is that I genuinenly think politics is fascinating. I read Ben Smith’s blog obsessively (he actually emailed me once after Bill Clinton came to Bryn Mawr! It was so cool) and can not get enough of Dave Weigel either.

So last year, when I was nominated to be the SGA Elections Coordinator, I should have jumped at the chance, right? Wrong.

It took a lot of convincing to get me to run. It took at least three separate conversations with different people for me to decide to take the plunge. I did and now I hold that position.

My job is pretty self-explanatory. I coordinate the three rounds of elections held each year. One just started on Monday, so that’s pretty much my life right now.

I brought up that it took three conversations to convince me to run not because it’s atypical, but because it’s common. One of the facts I learned from Dee Dee Myer’s “Why Women Should Rule the World” is that women candidates need to be asked three times before they actually agree to run for office.

It was true for me (and loads of my friends in SGA) and something that I’ve been thinking a lot about during this latest round of nominations. As women’s college, Bryn Mawr is dedicated to making the next generation of women leaders. So I’m trying to get people used to the idea of running for office.

The Elections Board and I are actively recruiting qualified candidates and convincing them they would be good fits for the open positions. We’re trying to get women used to the idea of running for office.

It’s funny, but one of the things that we take for granted about BMC being a women’s college is that all the student leadership positions are held by women. It sounds obvious, but it’s so far from the norm at many places.

Lisa Belkin just wrote an article for the New York Times about life at Princeton. She writes,

“In social settings and in relationships, men set the pace, made the rules and acted as they had in the days when women were still “less than.”

I was shocked when I read that. It’s just so far from what we experience here each day. Women here run the show. And we’re proud of it.