The four Co-President candidate pairs who would be proceeding to the second round of voting were announced by Kate Dolan, Assistant Dean of Students and Residential Life, in an email to the Andover community on Monday. According to Dolan, the second round of voting will take place on February 21, following a forum for candidates to share about themselves and their platforms.
Nigel Savage ’23 and Sui Yu ’23
Nigel Savage: Our big themes are empowering students with more freedoms and more personal responsibilities. Our specific policies to emphasize personal responsibilities is through expanding room visitation hours, revival for stressroom, and abolishing sign-ins for Upperclassmen dorms. We believe that we should be able to trust the students who are all very talented and smart, to go to school and play by the rules. Students deserve that freedom, and we believe that they can handle the responsibility.
Sui Yu: We want to make our campaign as engaging as possible because we really want people to know and be aware of the changes we are trying to implement for the school, to allow them to reason as to why we are running for presidency. We’re trying to make more fun engaging videos and it has been a great time. Also just conversing with people, I love talking to people about our platform, our campaign, and getting questions about it. I look forward greatly to the forum to share more about our ideas.
Victoria Ortiz ’23 and Jason Zhang ’23
Victoria Ortiz: I do a lot of work in different spaces around campus, a lot of [Community and Multicultural Development (CaMD)] related stuff, and I feel like the culture is slowly but surely shifting towards justice efforts with more engagements and forums surrounding inclusion and equal representations for the diverse student body. We want to build a deeper sense of unity and help people understand why this sense of othering within the student body and censorship could negatively affect our school community.
Jason Zhang: I think one of the most important things we were thinking of when we were doing our platform is practicality. For us, it was really important not only to present ideas that would excite people and make people think like, “Well, this is a really good idea,” but also to ensure that all of those proposals are actually possible… It’s more on how we can bridge the gap between student demands and what could actually be done, so we want to communicate alongside with faculty and ensure that you know, everything is possible while basing our ideas off of students’ suggestions.
Fred Javier ’23 and Kianna Jean-Francois ’23
Fred Javier (in an email to The Phillipian): We want to emphasize our efforts to publicize and improve existing mental health resources. While this would include advocating for more flexible hours, a lot of our efforts are geared towards creating new preventative pathway plans with [the Rebecca M. Sykes Wellness Center] and the counseling team to normalize using mental health resources as a preventative measure rather than just a reactive last resort. We believe the effectiveness and advertisement of mental health resources plays a serious role in determining the quality of student life on campus.
Kianna Jean-Francois (in an email to The Phillipian): Fred and I have worked together in the past, within Alianza Latina, and to organize other community efforts on campus, so we know that we work well together. We both enjoy the work of organizing, getting to interact with new people, and having valuable conversations about the future of our campus. Although we are individually passionate about student needs/issues, we sometimes have different ideas or viewpoints about campus. This is something that actually pushes us to have strong communication because we know that we want to hear perspectives that differ from our own, meaning we need to be just as strong listeners as we are sharers.
Allie Chung ’23 and Venkat Sundaram ’23
Allie Chung: Because I love Andover and love this community, it’s frustrating to hear a lot more complaints around me with my friends and with people I know… the whole communication and transparency aspect between students, administration, and faculty is really important to me, and I thought that Co-President would be the optimal position to work on that through and then when Venkat reached out, it was perfect.
Venkat Sundaram: I think for us, we really hope our ideas resonate with people in our community. And if they do, we hope we’re elected as Co-Presidents and get to execute on our ideas and really improve the community and impact the students. We’re super excited for the next process. It’s already been a lot of fun so far, but we are looking forward to more of the fun ahead. Whether that means in the next three weeks or so, we’re super, super excited for the future.
