Felix Interviews Felix Candidate: Grace Rahman

What made you run for this position?

I just love Felix, man.

What is the main change you would like to implement if elected?

Our online presence would be my main priority. At the moment our website isn’t as good as it could be, but we’ve got the content that could make it great. I’m also going to cheat and say another thing, which is a personal one for me: I really wish I’d got involved with Felix in my first year, but I was a bit intimidated and I’m not convinced that was just because I was a wimp. All the friends I’ve now roped into writing something for the music section, who wouldn’t have done so before, really enjoyed it. I want people to feel comfortable enough to waltz into the office having not written for Felix before and get involved - be it occasionally, once, or every week.

What is your favourite thing about Imperial?

Cheesy curly fries and the basement at Beit. So ideally curly fries in the basement.

What is the biggest challenge you foresee in the next year?

For me that’ll probably be getting more people involved – like the kind of person who always fancied doing bit for the paper but never got round to it. It’s sad that no-one else is running for Editor, and it shouldn’t be like that. I’m convinced that enough students have the opinions and the skills that would make for a bulging Felix every week that everyone would be reading, sharing and sending clippings from to their mums back home. That’s a bit of a ‘I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles’ attitude, but it’s my aim. If I can create an atmosphere where people feel like they can just roll up and write an article regardless of whether they know anyone at Felix (and make a swish website, and don’t burn down anything) I’ll feel I’ve achieved something.

Do you (or do you know anyone) who would have any coding abilities to ensure you could build a new website/revamp the app from scratch?

Lol. I won’t pretend I can code. For me it’s mainly a visual thing: I want the website to look more modern. I’ve spoken to our current website editor about what we can do and apparently we’re in quite a good position to make changes, or at least in a better position than Felix has been in past years. There’s talk of moving to Drupal which would involve relatively less coding. As for people, fucking hell man, we go to the best Science and Tech university in the world. If I can’t find any coders before September, the Felix website is the least of the world’s problems. The babe that is Phil Kent has offered his services for now, but he’s leaving. An inconsistency in who runs the website is an inevitable problem and I don’t know exactly how we’d fix it yet, but it’s on my list.

What other social media do you plan to utilise to help spread news quicker?

We’ve got the Facebook and the Twitter, and they plod along nicely. People see and they share, which is nice, but to generate more I think there really should be an emphasis on putting the articles online faster and releasing them throughout the week. This would create hype around the stories that hopefully would encourage more people to pick up the paper come Friday. There are some other things we could be doing. I really like the idea of having Felix photographers at as many events as possible. They’ll take pictures that we can use to accompany coverage as well as sharing them as album on Facebook for people to tag themselves. It’ll be an additional service that Felix provides, emphasising the social necessity of a having a student voice at Imperial.

How will you attract enough writers to launch “Another Castle”?

People play games. I know this because I hid an XBOX controller when I was a first year in halls and people got really fucking angry. People can write and have opinions. We have a games section now and huge SciFi society – a few hundred people go to Picocon every year. Like Phoenix and I, Science, the interest is there, we just need to tap into it. Whether that’s by teaming up with societies, advertising in our own paper and on the website, or using the retro tried and tested mailing list way, I think we have enough interest for a pull-out. This method is not 100% effective.