Political Science Club at the Faculty of Social Sciences Aims to Enhance Communication among Students

The students’ Political Science Club at the Faculty of Social Sciences has been working for just over a year now but has a good number of successful and interesting events under its belt. I-forum talked to the club’s chairman Erik Hrušč, a bachelor’s student of political science, international relations and economics at the Faculty of Social Sciences, about the club’s founding and activities.

One of our main goals was and still is to facilitate communication among students in different years and across all forms of study.  We believe we are succeeding in fulfilling our goals and the club is beneficial to all students at the IPS. But we still have a long way to go.

Can you tell us how the club is managed? Who is in its leadership and how often do you meet?

The club has an interesting governing structure. Officially, the club is led by a board of six members (at the moment, two from each year of the bachelor’s course) which is appointed every year. But the club’s philosophy is an active approach, therefore we encourage everyone who is interested and can contribute to the club to participate in its management. In practice it means that, on average, twelve people turn up at the management meetings, a kind of “broader presidium”. These meetings take place regularly, once every two weeks, or more frequently if necessary. Of course, as far as official matters are concerned, such as communication with the faculty or institute management as well as with outside organizations, those are handled by the official presidium members.

The leadership of the Political Science Club at the Charles University Faculty of Social Sciences

What is the response to the club among the students at the Faculty of Social Sciences?

So far we’ve only encountered positive reactions, at least as far as the students at the IPS are concerned. Students from the whole of the Faculty of Social Sciences come to our events and we also try to collaborate with other clubs at the faculty. The cooperation is only starting now but we believe that over the course of time things will change and there will be substantial communication and collaboration among the students of the five institutes of the Faculty of Social Sciences. We often receive suggestions for events from students who are not directly involved in the Political Science Club but see the club as an opportunity for putting their ideas into effect.

Can you give us examples of events that you have organized and invite us to some future ones?

It is true that we are a young club, we’ve been around for just over a year, but despite that we’ve got a number of interesting events under our belt. We organized several lectures and discussions on different topics. Our past guests include, amongst others, Karel Schwarzenberg, Jana Hybášková and Alexandr Vondra. We organized discussions with our teachers, mainly with regard to last year’s elections. Another event worth mentioning was a “meet’n’greet” event for IPS students. The Faculty of Social Sciences has a tradition of “freshers’ icebreakers” for first-year students that we want to maintain. And there were, of course, some informal events in the course of the year. As for future events, we would like to use this opportunity to invite everyone to a forthcoming Conference of Political Science Students in cooperation with political science departments of the Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Social Studies in Brno. We also intend to continue in our discussions on different topics. You can find more information about our events as well as the club itself on our website at pkfsvuk.cz.

(Lucie Kettnerová)

Translation: Pavla Horáková