A few years ago I ran for president of the SFSS. I sat where today’s candidates sit and I have heard what they heard. This type of experience is exceptionally rare and has resulted in me carrying a level of expertise that most people can only dream of. It would be a shitty dream, but a dream it would be.

Alright, so maybe my campaign was just an excuse for me to make jokes. And maybe my one and only campaign promise was that I would resign on my first day in office. And maybe one of my posters extensively quoted the inspiring Black Eyed Peas song “My Humps”. That might make my campaign slightly different than today’s candidates, but like it or not, I still have more experience than them. Pretty dumb, right?

Anyways, read away candidates, because I have some dumb tips for your dumb faces.

1. Don’t drop out of the race.

Many pundits consider my decision to drop out the main reason I lost the election. Don’t make my mistake. On that note, don’t decide that “not writing the next essay” is a way to get back at your TA for being unfair: he had less work to do and you failed a class about TV shows. Who won there Colin? Who won there?

2 . Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

Oh, you’re going to throw the sweetest party ever with the most popular and critically acclaimed bands and beers are only going to cost $1 and Fox Field will be full of thousands of SFU students praising the organizational, budgetary, and email-sending capabilities of their fearless SFSS leaders?

Nope. Not going to happen. It’s just not. Start small. That’s how a culture of fun events works. If you throw an event for 300 people, and 400 people show up, that’s good. Now you have 300 people that want to bring their friends to the next awesome sold out event and another 100 that will be dying to get in next time. However, if you try and throw an event for 5000 people and 1000 people show up you just have 1000 people who were at a lame party. Keep your events small and frequent, not big and disappointing.

3. Register in classes.

You can’t represent students if you are not actually registered as a student. It’s the same reason that I, as a young male, can’t be the president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. No amount of hating drunk driving and loving Ellen DeGeneres will change that.

4. Follow @colin_sharp on Twitter

I mostly just tweet jokes and comments about hip-hop, but I fail to see how this will harm your campaign, so just do it. I probably won’t follow you back.

5. Remember that none of this matters.

Did you know that BC Premier Christy Clark was President of the SFSS? Yeah, neither did the rest of the province. No one is paying attention to you. You could probably moon the crowd right now, go skinny dipping in the AQ Pond, and then go knock on Andrew Petter’s door to personally ask him for a towel and 90 per cent of SFU students would never hear about it. That means you can relax.

Alright candidates, I hope you feel as though you learned something here. To whoever wins this election, I hope you aren’t a complete failure. To whoever loses this election, congratulations! You don’t have to be president. And to the skinny dippers, remember that the AQ pond is super shallow and the bottom is really slippery.