Senior Committee appointed

By Kevin Lin     10/7/10 7:00pm

Senior parties: They're classy, they're off campus and they're some of the last haphazard mementos of college life before seniors graduate and go off into the real world. In charge of organizing these grown up public parties: the newly selected seniors of the Rice Senior Committee.Jones College senior Skyler Johnson, Hanszen College senior Cristina Halliburton, Wiess College senior Darren Arquero and Wiess senior Siegfried Bilstein were selected as this year's executive group of the Senior Committee. While they make up the primary leadership of the group, the Senior Committee will eventually have one senior from every college in its mix, resulting in a minimum of 11 members.

The Senior Committee's main responsibility is organizing the two big senior parties of the year, Hundred Days and Senior Gala, both of which are in the spring, Student Association President Selim Sheikh said. Sheikh helped oversee the selection progress this year. Out of a group of five applicants, four were chosen.

"Though we had a small number of applicants, the applicants we got were very good," Sheikh said. "I look forward to the events they put on."

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The senior executive group had various reasons for running for office.

"I wanted to have fun my senior year and I think being part of the process and putting together the biggest parties of senior year is a good way to go out," Arquero said.

Bilstein wanted to make sure that everything continued to run smoothly.

"I really enjoyed last year's senior events and I wanted to make sure that we have at least as good of events this year," Bilstein said.

As for Halliburton, being on the senior committee was the fruition of a long-time goal.

"I have been talking about applying to Senior Committee since sophomore year," Halliburton said. "I started going to Hundred Days freshman year. I'm from Houston so I know the city well. Every venue we've been to, I've been to before."

Planning ahead, the Senior Committee talked about learning from the mistakes of previous senior parties. For instance, they don't want a repeat of last year's Senior Gala that ran out of food early on.

"The booze to food ratio was out of control," Halliburton said.

Another issue with Senior Gala they hope to resolve is available tickets. Only around 400-500 tickets were issued last year, Bilstein said. Besides not having enough tickets, seniors also didn't have priority in tickets, Halliburton said.

"One of the major problems of last year was they picked a really pricey venue," Halliburton said. "They didn't have enough tickets for the entire senior body to attend the senior party. I ended up giving my ticket to a senior when I found out."

The Senior Committee will also put more focus on promoting senior parties and events this year, Halliburton said.

The executive group has already been thinking about venues for Hundred Days. Rich's, a large dance club in midtown Houston is a likely contender. It is a popular venue with plenty of space to accommodate everyone, Arquero said.

"It's going to be awesome," Halliburton said. "It's senior year; it's the time to celebrate.

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