Little Things

Key Takeaways: 

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• Benefits

  • Professionalism.

  • Convenience and Readability.

  • Dependability and trust in the caucus.

• Implementation

  • Quadruple check every document that we send out (make sure that there are no grammar mistakes, the links all work, and all the docs have full access).

  • Hold ourselves accountable and to a higher standard.

• Challenges

  • Sometimes typos may slip by because everyone makes mistakes.

• Solutions

  • Although we are human, as students of Stuyvesant High School, we will strive for perfection and keep mistakes to a minimum.

  • Own up to our mistakes.

Background

          Stuyvesant is known for being one of the most prestigious high schools in New York City, and its students are held to a much higher standard. This standard should be applied, to a much higher degree, to the student government at Stuyvesant. We believe that the presidents and the cabinet should be respectable and trustworthy. Our Little Things Policy takes a critical step to ensure this. 

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Research

          Unfortunately, many caucuses have made frequent mistakes that do not reflect this high standard. These “silly” mistakes come in many forms: typos that could be caught with a simple reread, grammar mistakes that could be identified using an online bot, linked files kept private from the student body, unfinished surveys, and many other seemingly small errors. However, we feel that these minor errors create a bad impression of the caucus, one that we do not want students to have.

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Benefits

          Our policy isn’t so much an actual policy as it is a personal guarantee from our caucus to the student body. By striving for professionalism, our caucus will show to the students that we are qualified, trustworthy, and reliable. One of our main focuses is transparency and communication with the student body. We want to show that we notice the minute details and mistakes to prove to the students that we are capable of larger-scale and more ambitious projects. This guarantee will benefit the student body as it will ensure that everything that we send out and do will be convenient, readable, and polished. While one could argue that “a few typos now and then never hurt anyone,” a polished article is much easier to read than one riddled with mistakes.

          We believe that focusing on supposedly minor aspects of our work shouldn’t be considered “going the extra mile”, but the standard. By joining the Student Union, we are taking on a very important leadership role, and the bare minimum for that should be to avoid mistakes, no matter how insignificant. By showing the student body that we care about everything we do, we are showing them that they can trust our actions, big or small. 

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Implementation

          We guarantee that, as a caucus, we will diligently strive for professionalism in everything that we do, whether that be an email, event, or policy implementation. This can be done with routine checks and tests that we conduct for every email, link, or file that we send out. We will also ensure that sharing options are correct and that our links work properly. Most importantly, we will hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes and make sure that we operate at a higher standard. Enforcing professionalism in every aspect of our work benefits the entire student body, as it makes our content more legible and convenient.

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Challenges

          However, as members of the caucus, we are still humans, and so there is a possibility that we may mess up once or twice.

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Solutions

          But this does not mean that we will not take these mistakes very seriously. We will make sure to own up to our mistakes and fix them, instead of ignoring them and trying to hide them from the student body. Through this, we will make sure that the mistakes we make are kept to a minimum, and the errors that do slip through will not be repeated.

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