Junior Classical League holds elections for new club officer team

Alyssa Huang (9) signs in to vote for this years JCL elections. In an email announcement, JCL advisor Scott Paterson named Andy Semenza (11) president, Edgar Lin (11) vice president, Jeffrey Fung (9) secretary, Timmy Chang (10) historian and Nikhil Dharmaraj (10) webmaster.

Angele Yang

Alyssa Huang (9) signs in to vote for this year’s JCL elections. In an email announcement, JCL advisor Scott Paterson named Andy Semenza (11) president, Edgar Lin (11) vice president, Jeffrey Fung (9) secretary, Timmy Chang (10) historian and Nikhil Dharmaraj (10) webmaster.

by Tiffany Wong and Angele Yang

Members of Harker’s Junior Classical League (JCL) elected their JCL officer team for the 2017-2018 school year today.

In an email announcement, JCL advisor Scott Paterson named Andy Semenza (11) president, Edgar Lin (11) vice president, Jeffrey Fung (9) secretary, Timmy Chang (10) historian and Nikhil Dharmaraj (10) webmaster.

“First off, I want to integrate JCL with the Latin program a little bit more so that it’s not simply for State or Ludi and JCL conventions. We can also increase participation in the class and talk about not just things about Latin, but also things like ancient Greek,” Andy said. “[We can] also work in the Middle School to help maintain our members better because we have quite a severe cutoff rate from sixth grade down to by the time you get to 10th or 11th grade and AP and post-AP levels.”

By this week Monday, candidates had sent a video of their speech and a 500-word campaign pitch to Paterson, who then shared them with JCL members yesterday. Members then voted for their preferred candidates during today’s office hours in Paterson’s room.

“I would like to see more activity in the club with respect to planning regular meetings, updating our online website and organizing and planning convention activities,” Paterson said.

This year’s candidates included Andy Semenza (11) for president; Edgar Lin (11), Jin Tuan (9) and Bryan Wang (9) for vice president; Sara Min (10), Jeffrey Fung (9) and Arohee Bhoja (8) for secretary; Timmy Chang (10) for historian and Nikhil Dharmaraj (10) for webmaster.

The current Harker JCL officer team, consisting of president Arnav Tandon (12), vice president Alexander Lam (12), secretary Venkat Sankar (12), historian Timmy Chang (10) and webmaster Peter Wu (12) sent out a candidacy application form to JCL members via email on April 13. This year’s election, originally scheduled to take place on April 20, was moved to a later date after Paterson’s return from his paternity leave.

The next event for JCL members is the upcoming National JCL Convention, which will be hosted this year at Troy University in Troy, Alabama, from July 24 to 29.