Staff Highlight: KPU Deputy of Operations, Vaishnavi Menon
If this year has taught me one thing, it is to be comfortable with change. When the Kennedy Political Union began its 2020–2021 year in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, I knew our team would have great challenges to overcome. These obstacles included maintaining student engagement, transitioning an in-person staff to a productive virtual environment, and ensuring new staff had the resources they needed to effectively conduct their work. The leadership team began making the online transition in the Summer of 2020.
As the Deputy Director of Operations, my position entails being a support system and coordinator for KPU staff. I compile meeting minutes, delegate tasks to staff members, and serve as the Director’s right hand. The majority of my time in the organization is focused on developing future KPU leaders and staff members through managing the First-Year Fellows Program. The KPU First-Year Fellowship gives new AU students an opportunity to get exposed to the Kennedy Political Union, AU Student Government, and the campus community at large during their first year. This program became all the more important during the COVID-19 pandemic when students could not physically explore campus organizations. The goal of the program is to build a group of future leaders who will grow to strengthen KPU in the years to come using the tools, skills, and abilities they learned during their first year. KPU First-Year Fellows play a key role within KPU by assisting all staff when needed and working with other branches of AUSG to provide quality programming to AU students.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated campus restrictions, my focus was to provide the Fellows with a holistic fellowship experience that spanned each branch of KPU. During the Fall semester, we assigned Fellows to each KPU branch based on a rotation system that had a different Fellow working on a different team for each event. This method allowed Fellows to gain in-depth knowledge about a specific team on our staff, attend associated meetings, and shadow the team’s staff during the event. During the Spring semester, we reformed the Fellow experience to ensure a comprehensive understanding of what goes into event planning. This system rotated based on the event rather than the team, and only had one Fellow participating in each event’s planning process.
Although providing productive, meaningful experiences for the entire staff was of great importance, fostering an environment of mutual support on the team was of the greatest importance. What I am most proud of our staff for is their continued dedication and perseverance during a very trying academic year. They overcame frequent difficulties to provide a fruitful events catalog for our student body that gave a platform to some of the most pressing issues and injustices of our generation. The speakers we hosted this year shared stories of struggles, hope, determination, and progress. In a year that has tested me (and many others) physically, mentally, and emotionally, giving powerful stories a platform has shown us that we are not alone, and that change and adaptation can make us stronger.
