Elena Silva, party of one, competing for a school council seat

For the upcoming university council and faculty council elections, a new party has emerged. A one-woman-party. Under the name of Dynamic Minds, Italian first-year psychology student Elena Sofia Silva hopes to win a seat in the council of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. What motivates her to enter the arena of faculty politics?

Foto: Kees Beekman/Verbeeld

The battle for seats in the faculty councils are usually a one-party-affair. For students at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, that always meant choosing their favorite representative from a list provided by Fractie Stimulus. Not this year. Elena Silva has entered the race with her very own party. It was a fairly spontaneous decision to run, she explains. “I had been thinking about joining the faculty council, but hadn’t found any information about it yet. Then I saw a notice that you could register for the elections. I went to the registration office and was told that the only way for me to run was as my own candidate.”

After some thought Silva decided to run. “I am like fireworks, boom, boom! I am born with a lot of energy, and my life goal is to use all that energy. And if you have the opportunity to help people, you should do it. A lot of people in the first year are pretty much shy. Sometimes, problems are not solved because people don’t report them.” Elena Silva wants to be the voice of those students. “Saying there is a problem but not trying to do something about it, means that you are only creating noise.”

“I like to change little things. For example, books can be really expensive. This year we had to use one that costs 126 euros. But the library didn’t have the edition the teacher wanted to use. So I filled in a request form, and now the library has the right edition of that book. That’s what I like about this university: when you report a problem, they try to solve it.”

Silva is not completely new to the world of politics. In her high school days, she was the student representative of her class. She has also been active in the Model United Nations. She even went to New York. “That’s where I discovered that I would never be a good diplomat. I think it is so unfair that a few big countries can veto decisions. Just because you are bigger, doesn’t mean you should have that much power.”

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