Engineering Student Council, UC Chile

For just over a year I was a senior representative on CAi, the engineering student council at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, elected by direct vote of 6,000 students. Founded in 1904, CAi is the university’s largest student organisation by budget, with a 25-person executive and flagship events that draw more than 1,800 people. The seat carried a voice and a vote on the Consejo de Facultad, the faculty’s highest governance body, where I sat alongside the dean, professors, and senior administrators.

The casework

Most of the role was not ceremonial. I ran daily triage with the head of undergraduate student affairs on live academic, faculty, and administrative escalations. Over the year I directly supported around 800 students, and I negotiated regularly with faculty leadership and the Dean of Engineering. The work was constant and rarely tidy: often a student one bad semester away from losing their place, or a rule that read sensibly on paper and was failing the people it touched.

The retention proceedings

The hardest part was the retention proceedings, and I represented students through 25 of them. Each one meant building a case out of the circumstances that had compounded behind a student’s situation, then presenting it to university councils. The audience was formal and academic-political, so the argument and the register had to change to fit the room. What was at stake was a person’s place at the university, so none of the cases were abstract.

Standing up projects and policy in parallel

The representation was not the only thing I worked on that year. I co-authored and secured funding for a proposal to rebuild the engineering school’s course-planning platform, then ran technical recruitment for the six-person development team from about sixty applicants. I did not build the platform myself. I scoped the problem, designed the team and operating model, secured the budget, and chose the people who would. Separately, I wrote a CS50-inspired “regret clause” policy proposal meant to cut avoidable course failures. The engineering and the operations were not separate jobs. In the same year I sat in retention proceedings, I was writing policy and standing up projects to stop students reaching them.

What I took from it

Of everything I have done, this is the work that fit me best. The year was a constant mix of coordination, negotiation, institutional politics, and helping individual people through hard situations, often all in one day. It taught me that I would rather hold the moving parts together and get decisions made than work alone on any single one of them.