Vote for Bharath · Candidate for Club Head

I only have
Four promises.

My success won't be measured by the number of events we conduct - but by the number people who find a new community to belong to.

This is not a list of everything Recurse could theoretically do. It is a short document about one problem I think matters, and the four things I am confident I can execute in a year as Club Head.

Name
Bharath
Current role
Community Manager, Recurse
Year
3rd Year, CSE-B
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01 · Background

A year of being a core member and Community Manager

I have been part of Recurse for almost a year now, working as it's Community Manager. Most of the work I did was behind the scenes - on infrastructure and organisation rather than anything visible on stage. Here are some things I've worked on:

  • Worked on hosting and managing the exam website used during the recent Recurse recruitments.
  • Worked on designing and building the KBC website.
  • Designed and built the Recurse Discord server.
  • Worked behind the scenes on most of the events Recurse conducted.
  • Took care of most of the day-to-day management of the Recurse online community.

None of this is remarkable on its own. I mention it for one reason: when I say something will get built, there is a record of me building it rather than only proposing it.

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02 · Why I am contesting

Club Head is not authority. It is responsibility.

Somewhere along the way I realised that becoming Club Head does not give someone more authority than the rest of the core team. Ideas can always be proposed. Events can always be organised. Anyone in core can contribute, and they do.

What actually belongs to the Club Head is the responsibility to make sure things happen.

That responsibility is the part I want. Not the title, not the introduction at the start of an event — the accountability for whether the plan on this page exists in reality twelve months from now.

I want Recurse to be more than the club that organises hackathons. I want it to be the place anyone interested in technology naturally wants to spend their free time doing things they enjoy, with people they like.

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03 · The problem

There are many Members in this club, but they don't quite belong to it.

It would be dishonest to start by describing the club as broken. It isn't. The core team is active. Events happen regularly. Hackathon happens. Workshops happen. By any reasonable measure, the club is not dead.

The problem is quieter than that. Outside of being in the whatsapp group, there is very little difference between being a Recurse member and being any other student in college.

More events do not fix this. A calendar is not a community.

So the goal I am optimising for is not event count. It is whether a member has a reason to be involved with Recurse on a normal week when nothing is being organised. Everything in the next four sections exists to answer that.

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04 · Philosophy

I am deliberately promising four things

It's easy to promise everything. But actually delivering on the promises is what matters.

I am deliberately promising only four things. Executing these will give Recurse the boost it needs to become a real community rather than just a club that organises tech events.

05 · The four promises

What I will actually do :

Promise one

Career guidance sessions

Recurring sessions with seniors who have already secured internships and placements, talking honestly about how they got there.

Everyone in third year is quietly assembling this information from scattered conversations, random DMs, and occasional meetups. The people with actual answers are sitting two years ahead of us in the same college. Getting them into a room, or a call, on a regular schedule is not a hard problem — it just needs someone responsible for making it happen.

Format

  • Mostly Google Meet, so distance and schedules stop being an excuse.
  • Offline whenever it is possible.
  • Interactive, not a lecture. Members ask questions; the session follows them.

What seniors talk about

  • Mistakes they made
  • Interview experiences
  • Placement preparation
  • Roadmaps that actually worked
  • Resume advice
  • Resources worth the time
  • What actually matters, and what doesn't

Promise two

Common Interest Groups, rebuilt

Small groups around a shared interest that behave like communities instead of classrooms.

CIGs have been tried before, and it is worth being precise about why they faded. The model was seniors teaching juniors. That sounds reasonable, and it works for a few weeks — until it becomes another class, with homeworks that no one does, and a slow drift of people who stop coming. Nobody was at fault. The structure was just not working for us.

A CIG should feel like a group chat that occasionally meets, not a lecture with a smaller audience.

How my new CTGs work

  • People showcase what they are building, at whatever stage it is in.
  • People discuss problems they are stuck on.
  • People share resources they actually used, not curated lists.
  • Seniors participate as members, not as instructors.

The specific thing I am trying to engineer is this: seeing someone else's work should make you want to build, not make you feel behind. That depends almost entirely on whether the group treats unfinished work as normal. Setting that tone early is my job.

Groups I'm planning to start with

  • Linux
  • Cybersecurity
  • Machine Learning
  • Web Development
  • Competitive Programming
  • AI Tools and Applications

Promise three

More community activities

Activities chosen because they bring members closer to each other, not because the calendar looked empty.

Recurse is already good at organising events. What I want to change is the selection criteria. Before anything gets scheduled, it should answer one question: does a member leave this knowing more people than when they walked in?

Formats I want to run

  • Technical workshops
  • Group discussions
  • Coding competitions
  • Inter-club tournaments
  • Technical debates
  • Project showcases

The metric is participation, not attendance.

A hall with two hundred silent people in it is a worse result than thirty people arguing about something they care about. I would rather run fewer things that more members actually take part in.

Promise four

Open source

Give members their first real experience of building software with other people.

Technology grows because people build things together. Almost everything we use daily was assembled by strangers coordinating through issues, reviews and commits. That process is learnable, and college is the best possible time to learn it.

What members would actually pick up

  • Git, properly — branches, conflicts, history that makes sense.
  • A first pull request, including the part where it gets rejected.
  • Reading someone else's code before writing your own.
  • Reviewing, and being reviewed, without taking it personally.
  • Maintaining something after the interesting part is finished.

06 · Community feedback

I would rather have your ideas than your vote

If you think something here is missing, or you have an idea for a event, workshop, CIG or anything you would like to see in the club, I would like to hear it. This manifesto should represent the needs of the community, not just mine and the version of it that matters is the one that gets executed, so I am always happy to iterate on this if it helps us make Recurse better.

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