Power.

Right after money, fame and happiness, it’s what we — students of a top-ranked, career-obsessed, too-cold-to-think-about-anything-else university — are supposed to crave. And, yeah, we do crave it: Before the average Northwestern student started spending their days scheming in the Norris crêpe line, anxiously filling out Dance Marathon committee petitions, randomly applying to prestigious-sounding exec boards, schmoozing to move up the ranks in their Greek houses and hustling to dominate discussion sections, they were high school BMOCs — yearbook editors, prom kings and, uh, chess-club presidents.

But it’s possible that a lot of us have it backward. Spiderman insists that with great power comes great responsibility, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that with responsibility comes power. Influence and renown are separate concepts, and yet, in the search to “make a difference” we end up padding our resumes, losing hours of sleep to extracurriculars, gossiping and getting gossiped about, but not affecting a damn thing outside of our own ASG-funded cliques. Power, at Northwestern at least, is elusive, and it’s not always held by the people you’d expect.

For the Winter Quarter issue of North by Northwestern’s print magazine, we’d like to assemble a list of the undergrads at NU whose actions really make a difference. And we need your help. We want to know: Who really makes the decisions around here? Which kids’ activities are impacting the most number of students — each and every day? It’s easy for us to come up with a collection of club presidents and ASG members, but that’s not enough. We want to find the guy who throws the biggest and best parties, always. We want to find the girl who has the NU administration’s ear. We want to find the student whose opinion people actually listen to. Because maybe if we can figure out who has power, we can steal it.

Kidding! Now make us love you by submitting your nominations.