Greek councils induct officers

The Interfraternity Council and the Panhellenic Association held their annual installation ceremony Tuesday night in the University Club in the Indiana Memorial Union. In total, 16 positions were filled for the upcoming year.\nJunior Ryan Goldschmidt was named IFC president and senior Mike Trent was named executive vice president of the administration. Junior Sarah King and senior Colleen Corley were named as president and vice president of PHA.\nGoldschmidt replaced senior Evan Waldman as IFC president. Despite the change, Waldman said he is confident that Goldschmidt will point the organization in the right direction.\n"He's a fresh mind; he has different fraternal upbringings; he's in a different fraternity than me; he's got a different background than me," Waldman said. "He's got great ideas; it's just refreshing to have somebody new to keep the good and get rid of the bad."\nFormer President Abbey Nimmer also has confidence in her successor's ability to lead the PHA. King has experience, having served as vice president of membership development last year.\n"(King's presidency) should be pretty smooth since she has a year under her belt," Nimmer said "Things always come up, but I'm confident she will be able to deal with it."\nDuring their tenure, both Waldman and Nimmer said they prided themselves on the changes they made as the leaders of the Greek councils. Their most prized achievement was solidifying the Greek council positions as more than simple figureheads, Waldman said.\n"We really defined and drove home the ideas of values and what values really are and what integrity is and what it means to have integrity," he said. "Before, those two terms were questionable and simply used as buzz words, and I think we really changed that a lot and remolded what it means to be an Interfraternity Council officer."\nThe two new presidents cited keeping their organizations at a high level of honor as a main concern.\n"My goal is to maintain my commitment to maintaining integrity," King said. "That's the best thing that I can bring to my position and to my community. I'm looking forward to addressing the challenges that we will face."\nWith nearly five thousand members in the Greek community to unite, Waldman and Nimmer each said the new presidents have a monumental but gratifying effort ahead of them. \n"It was very rewarding yet the most challenging experience I've ever had," Nimmer said. "You're developing your personal skills as well as leading 2,600 other women toward a vision of what an outstanding Greek community actually is." \nWith such a difficult task facing them, the two presidents already have some goals set in their sights. Both presidents agreed that the Greek council's top priority is risk management within the community. \n"There really needs to be a focus on managing our risk and being accountable down to every single member of every single fraternity that IFC sponsors," Goldschmidt said. "Personal accountability and risk management has got to be the thing that we hit hardest on."\n-- Contact staff writer Dan Patrick at djpatric@indiana.edu.