The Residence Halls Association’s week of events concluded Thursday with the opening of voting for the group’s presidential election.
RHA began the week with Monday’s congressional meeting. The rest of the week’s events included a meet and greet with the presidential slates at The Shack on Tuesday, the Iron Chef competition Wednesday in the Student Center, and election parties in 10 campus residence halls Thursday. Results for the election, which pits Chris Rucker, a sophomore and the RHA vice president, against Jared Grafman, a junior and two-year member of RHA. Results for the election will not be available until Friday afternoon.
But RHA’s focus remained on legislation, not upcoming events, at Monday’s Congress.
“(In congress on Monday), we passed a resolution in support of the diversity intensive course that faculty council is looking into and we tabled a resolution to show support of The Good Samaritan policy, both of which MSA already passed,” RHA President Lauren Thomas said. “We are now looking at them to make them joint resolutions.”
During Tuesday’s meet and greet in the MU Student Center, the RHA presidential slates said the turn out was not as high as they would have liked.
“There were lots of cabinet and executive members, five or six senators and a couple of passers through, but as a whole we didn’t really reach out to too many constituents,” RHA Vice Presidential Slate Caleb Krenning said. “The questions asked were very good and both slates really exemplified what their goals are if elected as well as for cabinet.”
Krenning said it was disappointing that only a few people showed up because people did not get to hear what the slates are all about.
Wednesday in the Student Center, teams who had signed up previously competed in the RHA Iron Chef competition. Each member of the winning team received a $50 gift card to the Columbia restaurant of his or her choice. The winning team, The Insane Chef Posse, consisted of Justin Seabaugh, Alexis Lyle and Caroline Merten. Their chef was Jeremy Elmore, a cook from the Student Center.
“I work at Mort’s, Caroline works in the dish room and Justin works in the Student Center kitchen,” Lyle said. “(For our team) we tried to find people that we knew enjoy cooking and who like to cook and have knife skills.”
The Insane Chef Posse’s first course was a tofu cake with golden raisins and chipotle apricot raisin barbecue sauce, followed by a course of raisin-cured duck on a bed of spinach and orzo with raisin ratatouille on top. The third course was cinnamon raisin ice cream on top of a donut.
Thursday’s polling parties in various residence halls were not largely attended, but each student received the link to the polling site in an e-mail last night.
“The event is a good way to encourage residents to vote and it was intended to be a reminder to them to vote, in case they didn’t when they received the e-mail last night at midnight,” Thomas said.
Thomas said Krenning’s Events and Planning committee planned the polling parties, but Krenning himself was not allowed to attend because he is a slate.
RHA week will come to a close 5 p.m. Friday with the RHA Ball at The Upper Crust Bakery downtown.
“The purpose of the Ball is to announce the results of the presidential election and each year we do a different spin on it, so that residents can come out and just have fun,” Programming Coordinator Natasha Desai said.
Thomas and the newly elected president will also be making a speech. The event is open to everyone who wants to come and tickets are $5 at the door.