Officerial Position Descriptions from the Officers Themselves

Co-Chair

Chris Hernandez '96:

The Co-Chair is most simply the leader of the organization. The Co-chair is in charge of maintaining communication between all of the officers, as well as understanding what is happening with any event the club does. The Co-chair is the main representative to the Dean's office. Most importantly, it is the co-chair's job to make sure everything that needs to be done is done, correctly. The co-chair must be able to give out power, and take up the slack for anyone working on a project who is overwhelmed or slacking. The co-chair very much represents the goals of the organization, and must have an important role in any large expenditures.

Kevin Martin '96:

Anything that Chris says is correct and complete, so I need not comment.

Kyle Niedzwiecki '98:

OK. The co-chairs are those upon whom the mantle of responsibility for HRSFA's achievements and blunders ultimately rests. They are in charge of overseeing the organization as a whole, making certain that the other officers aren't swamped, coordinating event happenings, running meetings, and keeping HRSFA alive and breathing. They are responsible for finding where the slack is and either picking it up or handing it to others while steering the overall direction of the organization to match the course set by the membership.

Ultimately what this position entails is making sure that everything else in HRSFA is working well. It's the supervisor position; you delegate responsibility or take it yourself, as long as the job gets done. Furthermore, the position involves contact with external forces that are not within the realm of External secretary. Anyone interested in giving books, etc., generally comes through the Co-Chair first. After you have this down, you then begin to solidify your machinations to gain world domination. Slowly at first, for example: "OK, back to the Masq; Chris, could you go get Nuclear Sub?' Pose it as a regular delegation of responsibility and no one notices at first. Your tasks are completed for you, and you're ready to take over the world. The revolution is at hand!

Igor Teper '00:

The co-chair's responsibilities are best summed up by one word: OCDOPL. That is, the Co-chair needs to:

• Oversee the functioning of HRSFA in terms of meetings, events, activities, and so on;
• Coordinate the various branches and SIGs of HRSFA and make sure that they have the opportunity to do whatever they want to;
• Delegate responsibility and tasks at the appropriate times—you can always find people willing to help out if you look hard enough;
• Organize events, meetings, and rituals, or making sure they're organized by someone else (see: Delegate);
• Pick up the slack, since there are always various and sundry small tasks that need to be performed; it is up to the co-chairs to make sure they are, in fact, performed;
• Lead HRSFA in its quest for world domination.

In addition to the OCDOPL responsibilities, the co-chair, as Matt points out, should come to all the meetings and drink lots of blue stuff.

Matt Withers '01:

The Co-Chairs are responsible for making sure that things happen in HRSFA. There are always people willing to work on events, run SIGs, and carry large bookshelves to the Quad. The Co-Chairs' job is to find these people, and put them to work. Then, once everyone is busy, the Co-Chairs should be willing to do whatever isn't being done. Being at all the meetings consuming large quantities of blue stuff is also pretty key.

Cassia Martin '04:

There are two parts to the co-chairs' jobs: business and social. Some co-chairs also have "big-ideas" for change that they wish to see in HRSFA.

It is the responsible of the co-chairs to make sure that the business side of HRSFA runs smoothly, so as to allow the fun of HRSFA to shine through. You will run general meetings, and call times for officer meetings. You should be willing to do anything that looks like it needs doing, and you should be as aware as possible of everything that is going on in the organization.

However, it is my opinion that the most important part of being a HRSFA co-chair is making people feel welcome within the organization. It does not matter how efficiently the business of HRSFA is run, if there is no one around to appreciate the effort. As such, you need to be ever aware of opportunities to increase membership, and in particular, you need to encourage and welcome first-years and pre-frosh who might be interesting in our bizarre goings-on.

Noam Lerer '07:

The second half of Cassia's description is probably most of what a co-chair does nowadays. Roughly translated it is: make HRSFA a happy place.

Now how, you may ask, is a co-chair supposed to do that? For such an amorphous goal, what each co-chair does varies greatly from person to person, depending on what they think HRSFA needs and what they think they're good at.

As you all know, HRSFA ain't exactly a centralized bureaucracy, so co-chairs very rarely directly make things happen. What does happen, however, is that attention tends to get drawn to you first in nearly every situation. The number of people calling me to find out what was going on went from about once a month before I became co-chair to 2-3 times most days after I became co-chair. You're expected to get things moving when people are indecisive. Get stuff off the ground, get people talking when there are long silences, get people doing something when they're bored and milling around.

This applies equally as much on a one-on-one scale. While you'll continue to interact with people in largely the same way you did prior to being co-chair, your co-chairiness will subtly affect the conversation. If you have tea or something like that with a freshman, and make this person feel liked and comfortable, they will feel not only that you like them, but that HRSFA likes them and makes them feel comfortable. I've had this happened a lot of times. Your actions both in a room of people and one on one will sometimes take on the feeling of being "HRSFA", primarily, though not only, for new people.

But aside from that, you will have a very strong, and simultaneously difficult to trace, influence on the general feel of the organization. The latest bad metaphor I've thought of is that the co-chair is, in a social sense, not the leading player, but rather, the one that creates the backdrop, scenery, what have you, for the club. A co-chair, in the way they go about what they do, can have a large effect on the atmosphere when someone walks into a room. A co-chair can add energy and intensity for a room or make it feel laid back; a co-chair is the main person responsible for making a room feel welcoming, and what sort of welcoming it is. A co-chair will have a large effect on how often people find themselves choosing unwisely and staying up odd hours, or how often, on the other hand, they go get their work done.

Obviously, you'll have the largest effect during recruiting. Co-chairs often recruit one or two people personally, but more important is the fact that, of the dozen+ people who always show up to prefrosh weekend and freshman week, only a fraction stay. How large that fraction is, and what kind of people they are, will depend on the atmosphere they see those first few times they come in, and how easily they think they can really find a home, or at least, a happy place.

This sounds bleeding amorphous as can be, you may say. What does this all mean? Well, much of what it means to any given co-chair is what their strengths are. Different people will think they can add to the club in various ways. At the risk of seriously over-simplifying with one-liners, some might be very good at making people feel cared about and understood, particularly at a one-on-one level, some might feel like they can inject more energy and general awesomeness into the club, some might feel like they can make the atmosphere of a room more comfortable and laid-back. It all depends a lot on what you think needs doing, and what your approach is.

So if you're considering running for co-chair, think about what it is this club needs doing, and think about what kind of doing plays to your strengths. And then sell it.

For those of you who may not have been here this long and are wondering what the hell I'm talking about, you'll just have to take my word for it that HRSFA now sure as hell ain't what it was when I was a freshman. A club can change a lot in a few years, and while most of it has to do with the fact that some people graduate and others come in, a chunk of it has to do with the direction in which the co-chair nudges the club.

Infernal Secretary

Michelle Melendez '96:

These are not set in stone. The duties change from year to year as each new set of officers decides. Internal Secretary duties (internal=dealing with things inside the University):

• Taking minutes at meetings, and posting them to HRSFA-List
• Maintaining membership lists, and other HRSFA non-financial records, paperwork, etc.
• Making sure the HRSFA library, card catalogue, etc., is in order, and staffed
• Reserving rooms for meetings
• Checking mail box
• Announcing meetings to HRSFA-list
• Other stuff that needs doing

Susan Groppi '98:

The internal secretary (also called "managing secretary") is responsible for maintaining the records and the physical plant. This means: taking minutes at meetings and mailing them out. Keeping the membership interest lists. Reserving rooms and picking up the mail. Maintaining the library. That last point is tricky. Sometimes maintaining the library is a very small job, consisting entirely of organizing office hours. Sometimes it's a very large job, like when Michelle had to keep the whole library in her common room when we moved offices, or when Susan had to figure out what the hell we do when our collection suddenly doubles in size.

Eli Lebow '99:

I think that it is a good thing for the Internal Secretary to be an obsessive-compulsive (also known as "anal retentive") person. But perhaps i am biased because i am such a person. It isn't such a tragedy if we don't know who our members are, but i really think it would be a good idea to have a list. This involves recording all the names when the Treasurer sells memberships at the beginning of the year, and pestering the Treasurer to tell you about any memberships sold later, including the flavor of membership (member/associate member; one-year/lifetime). You can then make such spiffy deductions as which SIGs exist although i didn't get around to that until late 1997.

Reserving rooms is straightforward; I'll show you the procedure. You then get a little certificate-of-having-a-room which you should bring to the meeting because on rare occasions you need to wave it at someone's face to convince them.

Minutes: Be able to read your own handwriting. I was worried about this because my class notes are terrible, but i think my minutes turned out OK. Just write down the salient points of what happened, especially votes and decisions, don't worry if you didn't get all the details of the Siswai'aman's [Gaming SIG's] report. I personally have a preference for complete sentences, with the word "i" lowercase in a lame attempt at spelling reform, but that's up to you.

Forms: The forms are silly. But not too hard. There is a list of what forms should be filled out when. (Oh, we need a new faculty adviser, but i'll speak to you about that later. Anyone, whether running for office or not, who can suggest a full professor interested in science fiction, let me know.) You may on occasion need to go kicking some ass in the bureaucracy when (to pick an example my fellow officers are very familiar with, because (as i forgot to mention) we keep in constant email contact and have brunch every two weeks to discuss status) the FDO insists you say in May what room you are planning to hold your first meeting in September or else they won't list you in the Frosh Bible, Mem Hall can't give you a room larger than 25 people, and University Hall can't give you a room because they won't decided until September what rooms are available. Previous experience dealing with idiotic bureaucracy a plus, but not essential.

Lori Ricard '99:

Eli summed up the job perfectly, in my opinion. The only thing that I can think to add is that the library is becoming an all-consuming portion of the Internal Secretary's job as our collection seems to be growing exponentially. I extend my sincerest sympathies to whomever is in charge when the collection explodes out of the current library.

Kaitlin Heller '05:

The office of Infernal Secretary is primarily administrative. Most of my work consists of taking minutes at group meetings and officers' meetings, sending out those minutes, and sending out meeting announcements one week before and on the day of the group meeting. I also reserve rooms for HRSFA events on campus that are not run by SIG leaders or part of Vericon. This includes getting a room for meetings and for things like the Masq. I keep track of the constitution and the current membership. The official idea is that the Infernal (Internal) Secretary is supposed to deal with all relations between HRSFA and Harvard.

Equally important to these responsibilities in my mind, however, is that funny quotes and such go out with the minutes. I strove in my term to keep the minutes and meeting announcements in the spirit of HRSFA, as did my forbears. It is not officially necessary to do this, of course, but it makes the job more fun both for the secretary and for everyone who reads the emails.

Chris Doucette '06:

The officer board relies on the Infernal to know what is going on—keeping track of not only what is happening where and when, but also what needs to get done in order for events to happen smoothly. Reserving spaces through U-Hall (or Loker or the Science Center) is integral to this, but equally so is keeping in communication with all the other officers—and keeping them in communication with each other. The vast majority of problems I've had as Infernal have been failures of communication on my part—in short, not knowing what's going on.

Exfernal Secretary

Matt Duhan '95:

The External Secretary of HRSFA has the greatest power in the organization, since he or she has to be the one most visible to the outside world. It can be a bit of work, but like any position it's what you make of it. The External Secretary is responsible for dealing with Harvard and outside agencies. This involves at a minimum maintaining the movie tagging book, and getting cool movie posters free from Swank. More than that, though, it's a chance for someone to let the world know how cool HRSFA is. If you like making deals (play Diplomacy, anyone?) then you can talk to other companies, and actually get them to give HRSFA free stuff, while making them believe that they're the ones getting the deal. It's a good step towards world domination. For example, while I was External Secretary, we got free movies, tapes, t-shirts, guest speakers, etc., and were able to make money for HRSFA (we hate being poor). Alden Strock also worked hard to get great stuff for HRSFA. Movies are only the beginning.

You know all those deals HRSFA gets at Pandemonium, Your Move Games, etc.? Well, that takes a good external secretary. You don't have to do all the work yourself, but you do have to have ideas, take initiative, and delegate responsibility to others. As an alum, I'd love to see a HRSFA reunion and a HRSFA SF Convention. That won't happen unless someone makes it happen, and the external secretary is a good person to initiate that.

Oh, and as for the comment that the external secretary does the work but gets none of the credit, I disagree. If you do a good job people know about it. Just think of it as pulling the strings of corporate America to make them do HRSFA's bidding. Worked for me. :)

Alden Strock '96:

The Exfernal Secretary usually ends up handling movies (something which must be dealt with at least every other week) and postering coordination as well.

Aaron Mandel '97:

The External Secretary is responsible for HRSFA's dealings with the world outside Harvard; in practice, this means doing movie-slot reservation, which is mostly Harvard-internal. That's life. Once every two weeks at a minimum, the big book of movie tags located in the Science Center Basement must be checked and updated, which takes about 15 minutes. When it's time to show the movie, the External Secretary also gets to talk to the people in the SC Prep Room about the arrangements and finally calls the distributor who's sending us the movie. This last part is easy, as Swank Films is infinitely more co-operative and solicitous of your welfare than Harvard. Yeah.

(A particularly embittered and not-to-be-believed) Aaron Landry '99:

External Secretary is a shitty job. If you get voted into the position, leave HRSFA. Unless, of course, you enjoy doing everybody else's work while they take all the credit...

• Job responsibilities: everything
• Job benefits: none
• Job mascot: a white kitten being raped by a very large shih tzu

Marshall Perrin '00:

The position of external secretary is one of the least-well-defined and thus most flexible of HRSFAn offices. Traditionally, yes, it involved tagging movies to show, but we stopped doing that a few years ago as it was always a horrendous money-loser. The job of external secretary is rather in flux right now as a result of that, and so it can, to a large extent, be what you want to make of it, within a few fixed parameters. So what does the job actually entail, then?

Well, the only obvious thing is maintaining our correspondence, which we don't actually have much of, at least not per se. There are lots of contacts with other organizations, though, and that's sort of what I've focused on. Examples: Buying shelves from Tyler at Pandemonium, announcing events such as the Media in Transition speaker series at MIT and prodding HRSFAns to go to them, promoting Arisia and other events in greater fandom, and things like that. I would very much like to see HSRFA develop greater ties to other SF organizations in the area, particularly MITSFS, NESFA, and the WSFS, so this is an area for the External Secretary to work on. Another possibility is total and complete world domination, of course. Beyond that, the external secretary has also become increasingly involved in helping the internal secretary to maintain the library, a task which grows larger every year. Lastly, of course, there's general helping out and taking care of things when no one else does—since the external secretary has so few well-defined jobs, s/he often ends up with some of the tasks that simply haven't been done by anyone else yet.

Hopefully that's enough to get you started—as I said above, the position is in a state of flux away from its former status of "movie tagging lackey," but these are some of the directions I've tried to move it in and that I hope it continues to move towards.

Charles Woodworth '04:

The duties associated with the office of Coordinating, or Corresponding, Secretary fall outside of the realm of the University proper. Anything that HRSFA has an interest in outside of Harvard falls under this secretary's purview. This includes, but is not limited to, acting as a liaison to organizations and individuals at other institutions, both corporate and educational, and organizing trips off-campus. To be filled properly the individual in this role should have both initiative and good organizational skills. The position is as important or unimportant as the individual filling it wishes to make it.

Treasurer

Mike Gleeson '96:

The Treasurer is responsible for the cash box, and for reimbursing HRSFAns who spend money on approved expenditures like munchies. The budget is approved by the officers as a group, and must be approved by HRSFA as a whole. The Treasurer always attends every meeting of HRSFA. Anything you have ever heard to the contrary is a lie. Now get back to work.

Chris Hall '99:

Deals with all of HRSFA's $$$. You need to keep up with people's demands for $$ and their rights to it and keep the records in order and up to date. Additionally there you have to re-register HRSFA at the beginning of the year w/ Harvard.

Note the Treasurer is also responsible for the cash box, and for reimbursing HRSFAns who spend money on approved expenditures like Munchies. The budget is approved by the officers as a group, and must be approved by HRSFA as a whole.

Tony Vila '04:

So you want to be a Treasurer.

Over the past two years, it is my understanding that the Treasurer should fulfill two main functions, and the office is at its peak when combining them. As an officer of the board, she should represent the membership and what she believes would benefit them, which includes coming up with new ideas and being an important part of officer board discussions.

The administrative function of the Treasurer is to be aware of everything that involves HRSFA's money. Collect memberships. Reimburse people timely for costs. Keep our accounts in order. Maintain our account at the local bank. Supervise discounts with local places of business. Work closely with registration at Vericon.

The individual Treasurer can still make many important decisions. What costs does she encourage Vericon and Fusion to find acceptable? What level of support should we give to sigs or individual events? What should the membership and con admission costs be? Although these decisions are not to be made on her own, your input is a key factor in any such issue before the officers or membership.

Fusion Editor-In-Chief

Cyrus Mody '97:

The Editor-In-Chief is entirely responsible for the production of Fusion. In the future, Fusion will hopefully be more closely coordinated with Writer's SIG, and the Editor-In-Chief might even be the SIG leader. (Or maybe not. You never know.)

Kelly Stage '99:

It is the Editor-In-Chief's job to supervise and organize anything which would fall under the "literary enforcement arm" of HRSFA. This mainly means organizing and slaving over Fusion. This does not mean merely calling for submissions and editing a little. This means learning how to do grant proposals, finding places to get money, and learning how to beat your head into the wall. If you learn how to write a persuasive grant application, then you're in good shape, since the editor always needs to write another one to secure another 300 or 250 dollars or X amount that is needed to fund the next issue. This is not as easy as it may seem, but the reward of finding that the UC or the OFA is prepared to give Fusion/HRSFA money is a glorious thing. Once you get the money, then you have to make the magazine. This means making posters, getting people to hang them up, bringing up at every meeting that we need more submissions, and scrambling to find art. Once enough stuff has been pulled together, the editor needs to organize the magazine itself, pulling together the fiction, non-fiction, and art contributions with a nice layout and perhaps a few ads, and hopefully a staff. Then you have to talk to Turley Publications, who are the people that make the finished product (and who charge us all that money). After Turley gets it and brings back a bazillion copies, the editor needs to round up a bunch of bored HRSFAns to distribute the magazine around campus. And then once that is done, the editor can rest, and fill out more grant applications. We currently have grants from the UC, Arisia, and the OFA (and dealing with Arisia is another "fun" and "insane" part of the editor's job; sorry I forgot to mention that). The editor is also a full fledged officer of HRSFA, which means that the editor needs to go to officer's meetings, discuss matters dealing with the way HRSFA is run and or operated, and make decisions for the well-being of the group.

PS—Fusion will publish in the next couple weeks, so people better get prepared to distribute.

Kartik Venkatram '05:

The Editor-In-Chief is responsible for the development and publication of Fusion magazine, the literary enforcement arm of HRSFA. The EIC's major duties consist of asking (begging, pleading, etc.) various individuals in and out of HRSFA for artistic content of varying type, assisting with the editing process, and designing the final publication.

Vericon Chair

Rebecca McKeown '04:

"Hey guys, we're having a con!"

The Vericon Chair is responsible for making sure that Vericon happens. This involves knowing everything that needs to get done (guests invites, travel, lodging, scheduling, building reservation, special events, registration, publicity, and more), and delegating people to do it. It's important to get a good cabinet as early as possible, and it's good to give people autonomy within their positions, but as chair you're ultimately responsible for making sure everything is done, even if that means doing it yourself. My advice is to start as early as possible (email guests as soon as you know the date), and to publicize early and often. I've included a write-up by Tom with comments from Tse Wei and me, and I'm always available to answer any questions you may have. I have much more documentation, too!

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