Interfraternity Council President Edwin Qian, a member of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, told The Odyssey that he has pursued involvement in Greek life at the university because it is something he feels passionate about and believes he can succeed in.During his three years at UT, Qian has been very involved with leadership roles in his fraternity and the IFC, helping to make the IFC more public and organized, along with leading the strategizing and implementation of new Round Up safety initiatives and ending the IFC’s controversial blanket endorsement system for Greek students running in student body elections.

“I got involved in IFC and it has been a great ride,” Qian said. “I think it’s one of those things where at first, you don’t really know what you’re doing, you just give it your all, and then you see what worked and what didn’t—and you become really good at it.”             

Qian, a management information systems and economics senior, said that he first got heavily involved in Greek life through his fraternity, which provided a lot of opportunities for new members.             

“The first couple of semesters, I was trying to get really involved in the fraternity,” Qian said. “[Pi Kapp] did provide a lot of leadership experiences for the younger members, which is cool, because my fraternity is growing rapidly.”              

Qian is from Plano, but grew up largely in Shanghai, China, living there for the majority of his early childhood.             

He said that his sophomore year he decided to apply for IFC chief-of-staff, the equivalent of executive vice president today, because he wanted to see how he could do in a leadership role and he had heard good things about the IFC from previous members.              

“I got in contact with Jay McNamara, who was the president at the time, and he liked what I had done in the past, which was involvement in my fraternity through rush, scholarship and philanthropy,” Qian said. “I think he saw the possibility of me bringing those skills to another level. Plus I worked with a non-profit at the time, which was doing a lot of promoting connections between top executives in Austin, and that’s kind of similar to IFC, as you are promoting opportunities with the IFC to the chapter presidents.”              

He said one of his first initiatives as chief-of-staff was to create a program in which fraternities receive money from the IFC for their philanthropies based on Facebook likes for photos they submit to the IFC. He said one of the goal’s was to make the IFC more public, to show the campus the work it is doing.              

Qian said he also helped to implement new safety measures for Roundup as chief-of-staff, most notably a centralized location to pick up Roundup admissions wristbands. He said towards the middle of his one-year term he decided that there were a lot of things he would still like to do for the IFC, at which point he decided to run for president.              

As president, Qian has helped to restructure the IFC, to make it more understandable and functional, along with changing the IFC’s blanket endorsement of Greek candidates for Student Government elections to a new system.              

“The year I was chief-of-staff, we received a lot of backlash for endorsing some candidates solely based on that these candidates are Greek,” Qian said. “Now that it was time for my administration to be in charge of that particular part of the university, we had a lot of candidates reaching out to us asking for endorsements, and we thought the only fair way for us to endorse candidates, or the way we chose, was that we were not endorsing these candidates, but these are the ‘pro-Greek candidates.’”              

The IFC invited all election candidates to speak at an IFC meeting and sent out an email to all fraternity presidents after, indicating which candidates had come out and expressed pro-Greek interests, giving the label to all that turned out at the meeting.      

Qian also mentioned that one of the things he was proud to do as president was modernizing the IFC’s operations to include more digital and online processes, largely to save time and create a more efficient organization. Recruitment, scholarship and IFC applications are all digital now. He also helped to produce the first ever IFC Summer Recruitment Guide, which has been read more than 10,000 times since its debut.         

Qian said that while some are quick to think that those in leadership roles like his are solely interested in boosting their resumes, that’s not the case for him and many that get involved.              

“I wanted to be president because it’s something I felt really passionate about, something that I really wanted to do, because I thought that it was cool, because I thought I was good at it,” Qian said.             

Qian’s term as president will end this fall, and he said he plans to graduate from UT in May. He said he would like to pursue a career in management consulting, something he was able to gain experience with through an internship this past summer.              

He said one of his favorite things about UT is football, and of all his UT memories, last year’s OU game stands out prominently to him.              

“A lot of people were saying that we were going to lose that weekend, but we won, and that was really an experience showing that anything can happen with the right spirit,” Qian said.