This semester, Christos Pietris was elected Student Body President for the 2014-2015 academic year. HC Marist sat down with him to talk about his goals, his run for president, and his work with President Murray.
HC: How did you wind up at Marist?
CP: I wound up at Marist because my guidance counselor told me that if I loved my mom, I should go to Marist. I was kind of blackmailed into going here because I applied to a bunch of schools; I got into all of them except Fordham and I visited every school that I wanted to go to. Then I visited Marist twice and Marist is only forty minutes from my home so if I ever needed to go home and help around the house, then I could just go. And it’s the nicest school in the two-hour vicinity, in my opinion. It was like destiny that Marist was here, so that’s how I wound up here. And also when we were on the tour, my mom just kept going, “Oh my God, it’s so nice here. It’s so nice.” I was like, “Mom, chill. You think it’s nice because it’s close to home.”
HC: What made you run for president?
CP: My friends actually made me run for president. I know this makes me sound like I’m a very peer pressured person, but I’m not. I’m in a fraternity and we would always talk about and complain about certain things on campus that really upset us. I was sitting around one day and my friend Isaiah goes, “You know there’s a freeze on the elections right now.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s weird.” And he was like, “Yeah, the other guy is running unopposed.” And I thought that that can’t happen, you can’t have someone just run unopposed. And he was like, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” And I was just like, I think I’ll run for president. And he looks over to the side and goes, “Oh that’d be good.” And then I did it. We had constant talks about who would be my VP and I was said, you know who I’d love to work with? My little brother. So I had my little brother run as my VP.
HC: That’s so cute.
CP: Yeah. That way we got away with a really cute campaign.
HC: What’s it like working with President Murray?
CP: He’s the coolest person I’ve ever met. You know when you see a famous person out in public and you think, “Wow that’s a normal person?” I feel like his fame here at Marist is because he’s such a normal person. You would think that someone who’s been in charge of a school for so long would just be drained but it’s almost like he’s going to go and do this forever and we need him to do this for as long as possible. He cares about everything you have to say. When I met with him, he didn’t break eye contact with me at all. We sat down at the same table. Everyone that works in the Greystone building was so friendly and treated me like it was their honor to be in my presence and I was like, “This is crazy.” This man is the most important man at our school. And he was just really listening to everything I had to say and he congratulated me and he told me any time I needed to speak to him, I could go and speak to him. He just really listened to what I had to say. And I told him, “Do you know how cool it is that you do these quirky videos?” And he’s like, “Thanks, I really appreciate that.” He’s a really nice guy. He’s very human.
HC: What’s your post-graduation dream life?
CP: My post-grad dream life would be to get my Master’s and then eventually go to law school after working in the business field for a little bit. I’ve always wanted to be a person who was a head of a marketing or advertising department and just give ideas for commercials and different ways of doing things and maybe one day be the CEO of a company. Who knows if that will ever happen? I could just sell bracelets on a beach.
HC: What’s a quirk that nobody knows about you?
CP: With my family, most of the time I’ll just break out into a Greek accent. Just mess around with my family and I do impressions of my family members, like spot on, and they’ll just laugh. English is my second language; the way I know English is through my parents and they have very think accents. Sometimes when I go to stores and I interact with people, I’ll bust out an accent or do that in drive-throughs. I just think it’s the funniest thing in the world when I do my accent.