Interview With The New MSA President: Meryem Sena Katırcıoglu

Why was becoming MSA President so important for you?

I care a lot about the community. I’d like to share a story — Since my first year at UBC, I had absolutely nothing to do with MSA and furthermore nothing to do with Muslims on campus. And, I got to a certain point where I was very homesick and lost and at a spiritual low, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. And I decided to kind of force myself to go to an [MSA] event, and I found a group of warm people. I very much understand an outsider's perspective on the MSA. MSA can be very, very intimidating for people who aren’t engaged in it and people who are struggling with their faith a lot. And so, it resonates hard with me, and I really care about just making it more inclusive, warmer community, and I see a lot of hope in it. Like if I joined MSA in my first year as an exec and if I saw that things weren’t going well, I probably would've left and not wasted my time with it. But I saw so much hope and people were working towards improvement. We've always been about improvement. And being on the exec committee for three years now, next year will be my fourth year, we've done better every single year, and we keep moving in that direction. I really want to be a part of that movement.

You were the Vice President before you got elected as the President. As an insider, what are some of common complaints against MSA you’ve had to grapple with?

The complaints that I’ve got: MSA is too judgy. It's too cliquey. It only caters to one type of person. Not enough of diversity in events. It's too bureaucratic and stuff like that. I don't agree a 100% with all of that. I don’t think we're too bureaucratic. I think it definitely can be improved. Personally, being inside the exec committee, I think we can better allocate responsibility, inside and outside the execs. I think we should be more open to reaching out and getting ideas from people who we normally wouldn't be getting ideas from. We need to start saying yes more to people's ideas because that’s how you start moving forward in innovation. As people were saying you know, we have a lot of the same type of events. In order to move from that, you have to start saying yes to different ideas. That’s how innovation starts. And, Insha’Allah (God willing) with that we’ll be more inclusive and cater to more people.

So, now that you are elected, what are the new things, both vision-wise and initiatives, that you would want to add to MSA as President?

I have a list of very specific structural things. These are things that I've been hearing from people. This has come out of conversations with people. One — which I thought was a brilliant idea — my friend told me to make the exec meetings for everybody. It would be obligatory for execs but open to the entire UBC community, Muslim and Non-Muslim. Hussain* wants to spread the meeting minutes around which again is brilliant. Another thing people have been complaining a lot about is the size of the execs and the lack of direction that the execs are given. So that's probably the first biggest thing.

One common perception is that the MSA an exceptionally large stagnant body. What are you going to change about that?

I do want to limit the number. But here's the thing — people start not getting as involved as the year progresses. In order to fix that, you need to do two things. One is make sure you have a size that is manageable. And the second is to make sure everyone is motivated and excited throughout the year.

They feel empowered to take their own initiative and be their own leader. And for that to happen, I want sit one on one with people and talk about their ideas and help them bring their ideas forth. So nobody feels like they're just sitting there, waiting for instructions, not knowing what to do.

Here's the thing about structure though. I have a list of little structural things that I am Insha’Allah going to implement and then build a culture. The reason why I'm not talking about structure too much is because the MSA gets a new President every year. The structure is going to change every year, depending on who the President is. It's not going to be a lasting thing.

Culture is what's going to last in my opinion. If you create a community, a warm and inclusive community, that is what’s going to have a lasting impact on the UBC community.

So what changes to do you want to make in terms of the culture?

I said in my campaign — inclusivity, communication and empowerment. And the way to do that is to form meaningful relationships with people. Some clubs view their presidents as a person sitting on a pedestal; that’s very inaccessible. I want to be very accessible to people. I did that this year with several initiatives. I sat down and had conversations with really motivated people. That's how the ski trip happened, with really motivated individuals came up to me and expressed their ideas and I took the time to sit down with them and work things out. You know, I want everyone to really not shut people down and if we have a lot of different people come in and we make ourselves approachable to a lot of people, they’ll come in. As a result of that, we’ll have events for everybody.

How much time did you really get to campaign?

Here's the thing — I wasn't focused on being president the whole year at all because I was doing what I was thinking already. It wasn't about presidency to me because whatever idea you have, you don't have to be president to do it. You can do it at any time you want, no matter what position you're in. And I want people to feel that, too. You don't have to be an exec to implement an idea. That’s how chat and chai started. These weren't execs who started chat and chai. That’s how the ski trip started. It wasn't an exec who started it.

There have been complaints that people barely got time to understand who the candidates are. So how have you been able to reach out to the people with your platform, except for that one Facebook post?

I was not involved in organizing the campaign process itself. I do have ideas on how it can be improved for next year. A lot of clubs do live debates and live voting, I think that's much more effective. I would do it that way. Have an actual panel, so you can talk to the candidates face-to-face. I think that’s a much better approach.

Are you satisfied with how the election process is working for MSA this time?

We’re adhering to AMS elections, which is what we have to do and we did do that. It would have been nice to have more time to talk to people. I think that’s how you know somebody.

So why did this happen then this year?

It’s number of things. It's a time issue. You know AMS gives us a schedule for things and it’s hard to work around that schedule. We had a lot of events lately which maybe distracted us from the elections a little bit. But you know, Hussain and I have tried to communicate as effectively as possible given our time constraint.

Any specific event that you’d like to introduce if you're elected?

I’ve always been really passionate about interfaith events. That’s a personal thing, so again my approach will be very community-oriented so I'm going to get opinions from everybody. I participated in a lot of interfaith events in high school. I’m very passionate about it. I do want to make a connection with the chaplaincy much better and other faith groups because that’s very hard to do. You know you get met with a lot of unresponsive people. But yeah, I definitely want to have a stronger connection with other faith groups.