‘Tis the season of AGMs, where clubs and groups meet at the end of the year for a recap and review.
The Trent University Music Society is hosting its Annual General Meeting on Sunday, April 12 at 5pm in the Hobbs Library at Sadleir House. It’s one of two times in the year where we can vote in members of our executive council, the other being our Fall General Meeting in September. And we’re always looking for new faces.
Here are a few reasons why you should join TUMS Exec next year:
It’s hip
For those of you who don’t know, the TUMS Executive Council are essentially the coolest kids at Trent, aside from the Jiu-Jitsu club. We have an ultra-hip office complete with a broken drum kit, some Christmas lights, and a couch of extremely questionable origin. There’s also about twelve shelves of random sheet music that we’ve been totally meaning to organize. Who wouldn’t want to meet there once a week with a bunch of music nerds?
It’s fun
TUMS Exec co-ordinates four musical groups: concert band, jazz band, concert choir, and madrigal choir. We’ve also been trying to get a jammer’s club off the ground for about three years now, but it always seems to fizzle out for one reason or another.
In addition to that stuff, TUMS organizes tons of musical events over the course of the school year. These include our weekly open mics at the Trend and our spring and winter concerts, which showcase performances by our bands and choirs of what they’ve been working on all semester.
And of course, there’s Battle of the Bands, the giant monster of a project that takes about a billion hours to organize but is worth it ten-fold in the end. Between the audition process, advertising, planning the event details, and helping out the night of the competition, there’s plenty for you to do. It’s also a fun time to hang out with local musicians and pretend to be super knowledgeable about sound equipment, when in reality you don’t actually know what a bass rig is.
It’s easy
Know what you need to do to be on TUMS Exec? First, you have to decide what position you want to run for. You can find a complete list on our website (www.trentumusic.ca), but if you’re a TUMS rookie, there are a few positions that are relatively easy to start out with.
For example, want to know what the TUMS Secretary does? Comes to the meetings, types up the minutes, and emails them to the rest of exec. That’s it. Want to know the last time we had a secretary? I don’t remember. This could be you!
Another position on TUMS is Events Co-ordinator. Much like their name suggests, they co-ordinate events. This includes stuff like booking rooms, designating tasks and generally making sure our events aren’t giant disasters. There are also five open spots for event co-ordinators, meaning that you can split up these jobs up amongst five people.
Finally, if you’re feeling keen you could take on our jammer’s club, and run as our jammers’ club representative. We’ve been trying to start a jammer’s club where musicians can meet once a week for an informal jam session. If you’re repping this group, your duties would include booking a space, emailing the mailing list, and leading the jam sessions each week (or making sure somebody else is). If you think you can help us finally get this off the ground, let us know!
Once you know what position you’d like, come out to our AGM on April 12 to run for it. All you need to do is present a short blurb of why you want the position and why you’d be good at it. Then we vote. It never hurts to give us a heads up that you’re planning to run for a position by emailing us at trentumusic@gmail.com, then we’ll be expecting you and can answer any questions you might have.
We need you
If this is coming off as a desperate plug for exec members for next year, it’s because it is. I mean, uh, no, we totally don’t need you that bad. But a bunch of our exec are graduating this year, leaving a skeletal council of past members who would appreciate some new people to boss around. Also, don’t be intimidated by getting voted in. We usually have a hard time filling all the positions and rarely have a full exec, so it’s likely you won’t be running against anyone. Unless by some miraculous chance a bunch of people actually read this article and come to the AGM, your odds are pretty good.
Basically, the main thing we’re looking for in an exec member is reliability. This probably doesn’t help our case in terms of neediness, but we’ve developed trust issues over the years from people being voted onto our council and then disappearing for no apparent reason. Please don’t do that, because it makes us sad and insecure when you stop coming to meetings and answering emails.
There will be pizza
Also, if for nothing else, we will be having free pizza at the meeting. April 12 is also our president’s birthday, so there will probably be cake or something because we like her. But be forewarned, if you plan on coming to the AGM exclusively for the free food we will almost certainly rope you into joining TUMS. We’ll also be doing our annual budget overview and constitution stuff too, if you dig that sort of thing.
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Hobbs. Sadleir. 5pm. Sunday. Come for an okay-filled time of normal meeting stuff and ordinary pizza. And also an extraordinary executive that you could be a part of. www.trentumusic.ca and trentumusic@gmail.com for more information.
