Tristan Luyt

Standing for Vice-Prim and House Committee

I have been a part of Pieke for almost three years now and the people in the PSO have played a major role in helping me get to where I am today. In this environment I have built relationships that will last a lifetime. The people I have met through Pieke have helped me learn more about myself and about those around me.

I have been serving Pieke every year since arriving and try bringing what I learnt the previous year forward into the next. Being a mentor in 2nd year, we figured out that it would be beneficial to be more relaxed and relatable around the first year in welcoming week, so that is what we took into the 2020 Welcoming week as the House Committee. Current circumstances have shortened our current House Committee term, which means all the plans and ideas we had for this year can be carried through into the next serving term.

I would say that as a leader I am very approachable and to an extent, I would even call myself an extrovert. I am very social and one of my strengths is forming relationships with people. This is hat I hope to do to help strengthen our partnerships with other Residents and PSOs. I would like to oversee welcoming again this year as now that I have had the experience, I know where we can improve both our efficiency and from an admin perspective. We as a house committee team for 2020 came up with a few ideas and plans for various events that could not take place due to COVID-19, these are the sorts of ideas I would still like to push forward in order to ensure that they get executed. I took maintenance this year and would like to have safety in the future, I would like to do the first aid course to help with this as I believe that it can be a useful skill to always have in life.

In terms of shortcomings from previous years, I can think of a few. Over the years of being in Pieke, the House Committee always seems to struggle with making the Piekstaai a welcoming place for the whole house. We tried a new approach during welcoming this year and it showed some improvement. Now it will take some implementation of similar strategies to help continue progressing in this area. Another aspect I look to improve is the approachability of the house committee members especially during welcoming and the start of the year.

A lot of the adaptions to events that I currently have on my mind have to do with ideas that were thought of for this year’s events. I cannot talk about a lot of the ideas that we came up with, but one of the main ideas that we came up with was providing alcohol free beer for free rounds of beer pong, promoting fun without the abuse of alcohol and help raise the levels of “friendly” competition between house members at these events, with contributes to comradery.

My main goal for the next term of serving would be to raise awareness of the fact that memories as well as relationships are discovered at events, not only the ones involving alcohol or late nights, but the simple socials that are organised throughout the year. By improving the numbers at these events, we can confidently plan more socials with others as well as internally.

I believe that you should always lead through example. Its always easy to give a lecture on what is right or wrong, but it changes the game doing what you are telling others they should do too. That is why we felt it was so important to be ourselves during welcoming this year to show the newcomers that they don’t have to try be like anyone else, being true to who you are has recently been the message I have tried spreading to everyone I know.