Elections in Winter Semester 2023/2024
Until Tuesday, 2024-02-30 at 12:00, you can vote online for the new Fachschaftsrat and the student members of the Fachrat in the StuRa election portal.
What can you vote for?
The Fachschaftsrat is, so to speak, the chair of the active students of Computational Linguistics. It consists of up to seven students who, together with the active student council, organise, for example, the Coli Weekend and make sure that student contact persons are always available for your questions and problems.
The Fachrat consists of professors, teaching assistants, secretariat and technology as well as three student members. They decide on the future of teaching; for example, the switch of the Programming II lecture from Java to Python was recently brought up, discussed and then also decided. What is decided in the departmental council can definitely have an impact on your studies.
Who can you vote for?
You will receive an introduction to the candidates for the Fachrat and Fachschaftsrat in computational linguistics by e-mail (in the form of short profiles).
If you are satisfied with the names of the candidates, you can find them (together with the candidates of the other subjects) in Schwalbe (“Schnittstelle zur Wahldatenbereitstellung”), the interface providing election data of the StuRa.
Why do we vote?
University political elections often feel a bit pointless, not least because there are often at most as many candidates as there are seats. Combined with the fact that it’s often not clear what the body being elected does at all, this then often leads to turnouts in the mid-single digits. So why do we even bother?
🔥🧨 Hot Take 🧨🔥: The elections are indeed usually pointless, and that’s a good thing: Normally, the current active student representatives take care of the next generation in good time, who are then trained and take over the tasks bit by bit. The elections are then just a kind of starting signal for the next generation and a mere formality.
But unfortunately, no one can guarantee that everything will always run ideally: Even though nothing has happened to us for the last half of a decade or so and we are confident that nothing will happen, where several people work together, conflicts simply cannot be ruled out. Perhaps at some point, different subgroups form within the Fachschaftsrat with contradictory goals or the students are dissatisfied with the work of the Fachschaftsrat – and it is precisely then that an election is a suitable last resort to resolve such a conflict. In such cases, it is also practical to have already established the election in good times so that there is no conflict over it.
Why should you vote?
We have just argued that elections are useful in bad times to resolve conflicts. But if it is a good time for the computational linguistics student council, why should you vote as an individual?
Well, three reasons:
- Sometimes there are more candidates than places (for example, this time on the Fachrat), so you can make a difference with your vote.
- Even if there are only as many candidates as there are places and you agree with all of them, we think it’s a nice gesture towards the candidates if they don’t just have to vote themselves into the committee with their own vote, but get support from the entire student body.
- In recent years, we have tried to achieve the highest turnout in the university, simply because we can: Last election, we managed to get 28%, the year before even 31.27% – although we didn’t manage to score the first place. To achieve that this year, every vote really counts (even the invalid ones), so we look forward to your participation!
This page (or parts of it) were translated automatically using DeepL.