Hi everybody,

I'd like to welcome you all to the Medusa blog!  In this blog, I will be posting about things that we have been discussing at the Medusa meetings and I will keep everyone informed on our future plans. I'd also like to remind everyone that anyone is welcome to attend the Medusa meetings, so if you want to come and witness them first hand, by all means do so.  Make sure you bring a sleeping bag and a toothbrush, however, as they always run overtime. If anyone is interested I'm pretty sure that the next meeting is on Monday the 15th at 5:30 pm (we tend to hold them every second Monday).  

For my inaugural post, I'd like to write a little bit about the Medusa shadow council, since apparently Dave has been getting quite a few pesky emails asking about it since the Survival Guide came out, and he in turn keeps pestering me to start promoting it.

Basically, the idea of the shadow council is to get first year students involved in Medusa as early as possible, so that they can get used to how it operates and then hopefully go on to become some of the next full committee members when we do the handover sometime around August.

We plan on having online nominations on DSO within the next few weeks and then to hold DSO elections the week after the nominations close.

I'll quickly give a bit of preliminary info on the positions that will be available, unfortunately, we haven't finished formalising these positions but we should have more in depth information available very soon.

The First Year Representative, will be expected to represent the interests of first year students at the committee meetings and to help organise and promote events. It will stand you in good stead for the presidency in second year.

The two Shadow Social Representatives will help Mickie G organise Medusa social events, and he has told me that he expects them to be fairly autonomous and to organise some of their own events for the first years.

The Shadow Academic Rep will help Timmy with his duties, which will probably involve organising topic summaries to help people revise for exams.

There could be a few more positions available as well, so stay tuned for further updates.

Finally many of the other Medusa members will be creating their own little unofficial sub-committees, there will probably be Publications and Community and Outreach subcommittees, so if you want to get into one of those just email Tommy D or Olivia. Membership in these sub committees will not depend on being elected and may even be open to second years.