Class officers have been elected to represent the senior class after voting Sept. 24

The officers were announced on Sept. 25. The senior board members include president Jeremiah Joseph, vice president Claire Song, secretary Ali Niaz and treasurer Rebecca Varghese. To gain insight into the senior board members and their plans for the school year, we asked them a series of questions.

Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What are your hobbies? What are some of your favorite subjects or extracurriculars in school?

President, Jeremiah Joseph: “I really like hanging out with my friends and just doing stuff with them. One of my extracurriculars is wrestling. I’m the wrestling captain this year. I’m pretty dedicated to that — after my first year here I started wrestling. Right now, probably my favorite subject is chemistry. I like science and I also really like English.”

Vice President, Claire Song: “My hobbies are basically art, painting, drawing and music. I play piano, guitar and sometimes ukulele. I think my favorite thing to do is probably my work right now — working at the vet clinic.”

Secretary, Ali Niaz: “I really like going outside. I’m into hiking, biking, camping, hammocking and all that kind of stuff. At school, I’m really involved in theater. I’ve been in it since I was a sophomore. I’ve been in a lot of plays. I’d probably say English is my favorite subject. I had a lot of really good English teachers that I’ve grown to love over the past couple of years of high school.”

Treasurer, Rebecca Varghese: “I have been doing theater for a really long time. I started back in fourth grade. My favorite thing to do is to sleep and my favorite food is wings.”

Q: Why did you want to run for your position in the senior class board?

Joseph: “I thought it would be fun. My sophomore year, Ali walked up to me like ‘I need you to run so I can hear you do funny joke Friday,’ and the more I thought about it, [the more] I liked it and I thought it would be a good experience for me. So that’s why I ended up running — because I’ve been trying to work hard to do a good job this year.”

Song: “I have been thinking about this since March last year. I just wanted to make as much of a change with our senior class as possible and I guess everything that happened over the summer reassured that feeling for me [of] wanting to be able to give other students an outlet to voice their opinions and stuff. Also, I know that times are crazy right now and I feel like a lot of people have reached out to me about how my social media has been helping them stay informed, so I thought it would be a good idea to run for an officer position so I can keep people informed about school.”

Niaz: “Some of my friends asked me to do it, like Jeremiah Joseph. He also ran for [office] and he talked me into doing it, and I was like ‘sure why not.’ I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to be doing, to be honest, but we had our first meeting today and we talked about what we actually do and how we can help our senior class and so I got pretty inspired. We have a pretty creative scene this year and I think we can do a lot of really cool things given what we have.”

Varghese: “I was talking to my friend Jeremiah and he was telling me that he was running for president and I had always had this lifelong dream of becoming class president and he was like ‘well why don’t you run for a position’ and it really got me thinking and that’s when I researched what the officers do.”

Q: What are your main goals as an officer of the senior class?

Joseph: “Something that I realized is not a lot of people know what is really going on right now, especially with everything being split between online school and in person. So, I think a good thing would be for us to figure out how to communicate more effectively with the senior class. I also want to be able to make it so we’re not going and spreading Corona everywhere, but also I want to make it a fun year for everyone, too. We’re going to figure out how to do that.”

Song: “Communication is so important, so being able to keep everyone up-to-date about everything. I know seniors have a lot of deadlines for dues, graduation, stuff like that. If it is possible, I know that a lot of our events this year are going to be limited but I do want to incorporate some kind of safe normalcy to our senior class so that we can have at least some memories before we graduate.”

Niaz: “We had our meeting today and I just jotted down a lot of notes. It was really interesting because we had a lot of ideas bouncing back and forth. Everyone has something to say and we had an idea and then someone else had another idea to add onto that one and I was writing down a lot of different things about what’s going on in the meeting. I texted everyone afterwards in our group chat and I was just like ‘hey guys this is everything that went on and I suggest we should probably figure out things for this and that by our next meeting,’ so I kind of just keep the group organized.”

Varghese: “I want to make sure every organization on campus gets their voice heard. With COVID-19, our schedules are really unpredictable and I feel like seniors feel like they are gypped out of their senior year. So in order to make everyone have the best year they can have, I want to make sure their ideas are heard and they feel like someone is listening to what they want.”

Q: How can you apply your past leadership experience to your role in the senior class board?

Joseph: “A really hard part about wrestling is the fact that when you’re on that mat by yourself; everything that you’ve done up to that [point] is shown there. You don’t have anyone to go and help you out, so I think that something being a leader has taught me is I have to kind of get [the students] in the mindset that they need to work hard right now and they have to set themselves up for success for their future matches.”

Song: “Being president and founder of [the] photography club really gave me a sense of responsibility and it helped me work on my communication because leading a club where you need to teach people forces you to be really good at communication. Communication is really important this year and I think that having had that experience with always being on top of communication is going to help me out. Along with [that], I’ve been a social media officer for Operation Hebron. Even though that club was only there at Hebron for a really short amount of time, that kind of gave me a little bit of experience for how communication would work for a different type of club.”

Niaz: “I’ve been involved in several Boy Scout leadership roles. The biggest one was [when] I was a senior patrol leader, we call it SPL, so I was basically in charge of that whole troop of 50-something boys and I ran for two terms, so I was the leader of the troop for two years. It was really stressful — I learned a lot about communication and how to keep organized, all that kind of stuff. I’m also improv captain for theater and I’ve also been in bigger roles, so I just know how to lead by example. In improv, you have to keep organized, plan out the shows, know what’s going to be going on, when it’s going to be going on and making sure everyone is on board with everything. Basically, the whole thing is communicating and making sure everyone knows what’s going on.”

Varghese: “Theater has its own honor society and it’s called Thespians Honor Society and I’m treasurer of that, so I definitely know how to manage money in large quantities. I know how fees work and we’ve already done processes for fundraising for theater so I think I can apply all those skills to senior class.”

Q: Do you think the restrictions imposed by COVID will make it harder for you to connect with the seniors?

Joseph: “Maybe. I have some ideas as to how we can help them to know us better and to make more of a connection with the senior class but I still have to get the rest of my senior class officers on board with that.”

Song: “It probably will make it a little more difficult just because I did choose virtual. Obviously, there’s limitations because half of our class is all virtual right now. I think that we can get the most out of communication through technology that we have.”

Niaz: “For sure. One of our issues we talked about today was [that] it’s hard because a lot of our seniors are at home — they’re doing virtual plus or just all virtual and so they’re not at school so it’s hard to get information out to them. We talked about some things on how to work on that. I think we had some good ideas rolling. Although it’s more difficult, we do have a lot of things that we want to do. I feel like COVID made us be more creative and we have a very creative group already so I’m just excited to see what we actually get done.”

Varghese: “I definitely think it’s going to cause me to have to connect in a different way and I definitely think our senior class board is going to have to be more creative. Would I say it’s hard? Not necessarily. I think it’s going to require outside of the box thinking but I don’t think it’s outright harder.”

Q: Do you have any future plans as an officer for this school year?

Joseph: “As of right now, I’m not 100% sure as to what we can do, but I’m going to be meeting up with the rest of the senior class officers and [senior class sponsor Michelle] Shadow to see what we can do. I want to be able to do stuff with our class, but we’re going to have to see what we can do with restrictions imposed.”

Song: “I wanted to return some kind normalcy by trying to make events possible.”

Niaz: “Yeah, for sure we definitely do. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about it because it’s not confirmed yet. We have some ideas going — we are thinking of more creative ways to still have our traditions and keep things safe.”

Varghese: “We have a lot to discuss with how we’re supposed to proceed with COVID still being a thing. My biggest goal is making sure our prom still happens, because I know when everyone thinks of senior year, that is what they think of along with their graduation. So, my No. 1 priority is prioritizing our prom and making sure in some way that it happens.”

Q: What are some encouraging words you want to say to your senior class?

Joseph: “I know that this year has been pretty sucky so far, but I know that we can push through this and that we can actually make it a good year and still make it a memorable one.”

Song: “I know times are tough right now with not being able to experience everything that other seniors’ classes have like homecoming and maybe even prom, and even football games are restricted. I want everyone to stay positive and try to make the most out of everything while still staying safe.”

Niaz: “There’s always a reason to smile. And go Hawks!”

Varghese: “One thing I want to say to my senior class is: it’s still our senior year and it may not be the one we dreamed of, but at the end of the day, only our attitudes can fix it.”