Student Leadership Initiative

Starting the Werewolf Line

Rajesh Mirchandani recalls the formation of the Werewolf bus line from idea to implementation.

Interview on 2012-02-17 00:00:00 -0500

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00:00:00.000 It was myself and a couple of students. I came up with the idea after visiting one of my best friends at Chapel Hill and seeing how well the P2P system worked,
00:00:09.347 and I was like this is, again, a no-brainer. Why don't we have this at NC State?
00:00:15.177 Considering how spread out NC State is and how big it is it's a necessity, it is something that's needed,
00:00:22.602 and unfortunately at that time when the talks had begun there were a couple of negative incidents that happened from people walking across campus late night.
00:00:32.178 So to me it was even more fuel to the fire that, hey, this is definitely what we need right now.
00:00:39.567 So basically what I did was I presented it, they said it is likely and it can be done in a short period of time. So then we met with the head of transportation at Chapel Hill, got all our ducks in a row, got all the information we needed.
00:00:52.922 We started a committee in student government to look into it, saw it was extremely feasible, and we saw the cost of it was minimal because we had all the buses already there at campus.
00:01:06.805 So once we ran the numbers we had everything to back it up and we presented it to transportation. They basically gave us their approval in everything,
00:01:21.501 saying our numbers were correct, all this was feasible, and they weren't going to have to change anything.
00:01:26.359 We took it from there to student government and it went to the vote, but before it went to the vote, as president I remember lobbying my senators to make sure because some senators, it didn't matter what it was for.
00:01:41.276 We took it from there to student government and it went to the vote, but before it went to the vote, as president I remember lobbying my senators to make sure because some senators, it didn't matter what it was for.
00:01:51.541 And trust me, I'm against any type of raise of tuition, fees, anything, but sometimes we have to realize that if the money is being well spent, it is accounted for, and it can drastically improve campus life,
00:02:06.954 that's why I was behind it. Basically I had to lobby the senators. Even that night when we went to vote instead of sitting behind the desk where I'm supposed to sit I was in the floor kneeling in front of senators,
00:02:21.999 making sure I had their support, and that night it went through. Basically in a nutshell that's how it happened and very quickly it went into effect. It was almost immediately.

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