Reflections on Not Being Re-elected
Harold Pettigrew discusses not winning re-election as Student Body President at NC State University and how he learned from that experience.
Interview on 2012-11-02 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Yeah, yeah, tough during the time to go through. It was probably the first time in my life-and this is more my personal reflections
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and then I'll get to some of the broader reflections and things-first time in my life that I certainly wanted to do something,
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was passionate to do something, and was told I could not do it. Tough pill to swallow. I had been very fortunate to have a lot of great experiences,
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with scholarships or applying for programs or jobs and internships and those sort of things, and so it was the first time
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in a major way I'd experienced rejection, particularly when I felt I did a pretty good job representing students, bringing new programs,
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those sort of things. It was tough. The fun of the first year certainly wasn't there, or the first campaign so to say. The dynamics were certainly different.
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I think what you had was great candidates in Darryl Willie, who-. He and I came in at the very same time, had a lot of the same experiences
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with being Leader of the Pack and other activities that we participated in. Some of the other candidates as well were all very involved.
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So the nature of politics, particularly when you're the incumbent, being on a college campus or not you're in the firing range, you know.
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So the experience certainly taught me to have very thick skin and to separate sometimes-well quite frankly oftentimes-politics from policy and governance,
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and being able to create a bit of a line between my personal perspective and understanding what is a political environment,
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or understanding quite frankly when you may be doing good but the people you may serve may not know the full extent to which you are doing good things.
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That's come to help me in my current experience, and I don't want to jump too fast forward but that experience really set the stage
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for many decisions that I made beyond that, that perhaps I wouldn't have made if it had turned out differently.
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It's always hard, because I think the difference in voting was like eight votes or something like that, so particularly, being a sports guy,
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do you want to lose at the buzzer or do you want to just completely be blown out? There's always kind of that perspective that I grappled with at the time:
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Man, if I had made eight more phone calls, or nine more phone calls, it would have been something different.
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My broader perspective is that things happen for a reason and they happen the way they're supposed to. That following year the campus dealt with 9-11
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and there was not perhaps a more spirited person to be the student body president than Darryl Willie. There were certain decisions
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that I was allowed to make, not being student body president, that led me on a great pathway professionally, that of course I couldn't see at the moment,
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and the ways I was able to work with the campus, not being bound by being student body president, I think actually helped a great deal.
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So, on the whole it played out the way it was supposed to. It was tough because the margin was so thin but looking back it was the thing
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that needed to happen at the time, certainly for me to have the pathway that I've had since leaving State.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
