Hi everybody! It’s that time of year – with our local section firmly reestablished, and new bylaws in place, it’s time to think about elections! We’ll be holding elections to fill the following positions this year:
- Chair-elect. The chair-elect assists the chair in the direction and management of the section. In practice, the chair and the chair-elect are the biggest voices in determining our agenda for the year, contacting the membership of the section to alert them to opportunities for outreach, scientific interactions, or social engagements, and otherwise do leadership stuff. The chair-elect automatically becomes chair the following year, so this is functionally a 2-year elected position, although historically the current chair becomes past-chair and spends a year helping to guide the executive committee. The chair and chair elect are also responsible for filing end-of-year reports with the ACS.
- Secretary. The secretary keeps minutes at our meetings, and has a variety of official reporting duties, such as reporting the results of our annual elections, sending out ballots, etc. Currently, our secretary also maintains this website, manages the executive committee email address cornell_acs@cornell.edu, keeping information on our events reasonable current in the ACS Community Connection website, and schedules our zoom-based meetings.
- Alternate Councilor. The alternate councilor fills in for the councilor when they are unable to perform their duties. Those duties primarily involve going to councilor sessions at ACS meetings and having a vote in the governance of the society. While not officially part of the executive committee, we currently ask the councilor to attend meetings, and the councilor (and future alternate councilor) have an equal vote in how we conduct section business.
Of note, the duties for these positions are not terribly onerous – we’ve got a great schedule of events right now that pretty closely matches our yearly income from the national society, so if you just want to help guide us through a typical year, that’s fine! A lot of what we’re doing right now is just trying to smooth out some of our procedures, get some best practices in place, and figure out ways to connect with a greater portion of the community we serve. But we also have funds to do exciting new activities too, if you’d be interested in that. In particular, we’re seriously considering hosting the Northeast Regional Meeting of the ACS (NERM), with a tentative date of summer 2027. If that’s something of interest to you, this would be a great time to get involved, either by running for the executive committee, or in some other way. We’ll certainly need lots of volunteers to make a successful regional meeting happen!
We do not yet have a nominations committee established, so we are soliciting self-nominations for these three positions. It is particularly important that we have somebody run for chair-elect, as we need to keep that position filled to keep the session active! If you’d like to nominate someone, or self-nominate, please email either cornell_acs@cornell.edu or the secretary at wkp8@cornell.edu with the nominee’s name and the position they’d be interested in. The nominee will then be asked to provide a brief description of themself, and why they would like to run for the office/what they plan to do. We will post everything we’ve got on this website on October 15, and ballots will be distributed on November 1 (if you’d like a paper ballot, please contact us at either email address to let us know. We’ll remind you of that when the candidates are announced). Voting will end on November 15th, and the election winners will be announced shortly after that date.
To be eligible to serve in these positions, you do need to be a current member of the ACS. To be councilor, you need to be a “regular member”, but the chair-elect and secretary positions are also available to people with “graduate student” memberships, so this is a great way to get involved with community service, maybe pad your CV a little bit, and certainly have a bit of fun guiding chemistry across the region. We’d also encourage chemists at Ithaca College and local industry to run for office – it might be called the “Cornell” section of the ACS, but our membership is diverse and we seek to serve more than just Cornell University!
If you’re not a member of the ACS, we’d certainly encourage you to join. But as a reminder, you don’t have to be a member to engage with us! We can’t offer you membership on the executive committee, but we’d be happy to have you head up other committees, or plan events with us, or just join us at some of our sponsored events. We’re really here to serve the community, so if you’ve got some ideas for ways the ACS could help you, please let us know.