I'm running for Grand Marshal.

I firmly believe that RPI is an amazing school: I constantly brag to my friends about RPI's history as the first polytechnic institute in the western world, and the fact that our school pioneered lab-style classes. I tell them stories about the Rensselaer Union, and how it's one of the most unique student unions in the country. I get to brag to them about our industry connections, etc.

Everyone here is passionate about whatever they do, and that's what makes RPI special. Wherever you go, you'll find someone with ambitious plans and goals, whether it's starting a business, wanting to publish their art, wanting to make a difference within their fraternity, or wanting to change the world with their research.

I feel like that passion is what initially defined RPI: students who wanted to shape the world through science and technology. It's what this school was founded on, as Amos Eaton once dedicated RPI to "the application of science to the common purposes of life."

In the past years, our alumni invented the microprocessor, the digital camera, and email. They built the Brooklyn Bridge, co-founded NVIDIA, managed the Apollo program, and right now, an RPI grad is preparing to command humanity's return to the Moon. Two hundred years of doing things no one else has done.

Yet, in recent years, our school has faded into obscurity, our school spirit is gone, and we no longer foster the innovation that our school was founded on. We no longer have fun traditions like the hockey line, or the huge concerts at the Field House. In a school where surveillance cameras get installed in front of living art projects, and where the administration is more concerned with logo redesigns than a crumbling campus, how can students feel any connection to this hill?

I'm running for Grand Marshal because I still carry that same passion that many RPI students do, the same passion that Amos Eaton hoped to inspire when he founded this school.

I see the same passion in my friends, in my classmates, and in the people I've met through Student Government. We're all here because we want to make a difference, whether it's through our research, our art, our clubs, or our communities.

We're not lost. We just stopped looking up.

Let's shoot for the stars again.