AS member is all about progress

Associated Students Vice President of Public Relations, and key member of the PCC Feminist Club, Mon-Shane Chou is all about progress.

A self-proclaimed introvert, the irony is not lost on the vocal feminist and public relations officer. Despite her quiet disposition, the twenty year-old perpetual full-time student still makes waves by sitting on more committees and government bodies than Leslie Knope.

“I don’t sleep very much,” Chou smirked when asked how she gets it all done.

Chou boasts a bevy of titles and accomplishments which include, but are not limited to Committee Chair for the AS Publicity Committee, a student representative for both the PCC Web Redesign Advisory Committee and College Council, and the current ICC Representative and Web Master for the PCC Feminist club. Chou gets around.

“I’ve learned that she takes a lot of things very seriously,” said fellow AS Vice President Joseph Garcia. “Sometimes to the point where I think she needs to take a break and relax. She’s a workaholic to the core.”

In her current stint as Vice President of Public Relations, Chou’s goals revolve around the idea of innovation and progression, a continuing theme with Chou’s philosophical make-up.

“These days, public relations is really all encompassing,” Chou said while describing the AS’ new interactive web site. “We’ve never had a web site with that kind of functionality before. ‘Its great that we’ve got it up and running.”

Even though Chou was a major factor in the completion of the website, she still believes her proudest accomplishment was when she played an instrumental role in having PCC become the first community college to host Coming Out Day, an event initially started at Harvard in which “organizations [come] together to promote gender equality.”

In her pursuit of gender-equality, Chou recalls a defining moment in which she knew feminism was going to become an important cause in her life.

Her high school’s equivalent of a feminist club (it was not allowed to call itself a feminist club due to ‘militant connotations,’ Chou said) set on a campaign to ban songs which demeaned women from their prom.

Controversy arose and students began to call them names and even delivered death threats.

“If we live in a society that hands out death threats to people who don’t want to be subjected to discrimination, to sexism, then I need to be part of something that’s going to change that,” Chou said.

Chou then asserted that people don’t have to have hairy legs, or be a lesbian, or a political-science major to be a feminist.

“Feminism,” Chou concluded, “is the way you live your life and interact with others.”