Get to Know Your Student Government: Senator Ian Brookwell

Ian Brookwell, 26, Oceanside, International Studies – ASNIC Senator

Favorite Color: Blue, green, and brown. Like the sky, the trees, and the ground.

Favorite Movie: “The Motorcycle Diaries.” I used to watch that every day in high school. It’s a coming-of-age movie [depicting] Che Guevara about why he believed what he believed, but also just that youthful spirit of traveling which obviously is important to me. And you just see his transformation through his experience.

How NIC should look a year after leaving student government: I want us to have more international ideas—just in terms of the language department, to be more strong. We only have French and Spanish going right now and I think that’s a travesty, especially with all the communities in North Idaho and Spokane. We have a big Russian community and we don’t offer that. I would like to get some German on campus. It would be really cool to just have greatly expanded language classes.

Inspiration to join student government: There was a combination. There was this time when I was in Ireland, I was sleeping in this car and it was raining and I had no other place to stay. And that was good, I had something over my head. But I was really depressed, really bummed out, and I was just thinking; “I really can’t do anything here, I can’t make anything happen, I need to get educated.” That’s when I realized I was going to go to college and I was going to kick butt. Student government was when Richard walked up and approached you [T.J. Gossard, Sentinel Features Editor], and you were like, “well, hey, here’s Ian,” and then you were like, “well, I guess not, you’re pretty busy.” And then I was like, “Well, I don’t know, I think I can do it.”

Celebrity Crush: Oh, I will never, ever, ever get over Milla Jovovich in “The Fifth Element.”

Favorite bands/music: I like Ryan Adams, Death Cab For Cutie, Muse, Radiohead, Iron & Wine, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, Coldplay, The Black Heart Procession, Irish traditional music… I spend a lot of time listening to Daft Punk when I’m doing homework as well.

If A.I. could equal our free will and chose to take action against our society, would it be OK to press a button turning them off: Yeah, totally. It’s just a computer still. It doesn’t matter how much processing capability you have, it’s just better programming. What intelligence is there is a feedback loop. So if it has an infinite number of feedback loops, that would give it a form of intelligence, but what we have is biochemical processes: we’re a living being. We’re not manufactured artificially, we are created and manufactured biologically.