Seventeen Students Declare UC Candidacy, Two After Deadline Extended

With two additional students declaring their candidacies after the original submission deadline, a total of 17 students will be running for eight open seats in the Undergraduate Council midterm elections, ensuring that no seat will remain vacant.

As of Sunday afternoon, only two students had submitted their declarations, according to UC Elections Commission Chair Matthew C. Estes ’18. Later in the day, the deadline for students to announce their candidacies was extended 12 hours from midnight to Monday at noon.

According to UC President Ava Nasrollahzadeh ’16, the deadline was extended primarily because all students living in houses with vacancies had not received the UC’s mail merge.

Undergraduate Council Vice President Dhruv P. Goyal '16 leads the Feb. 8 weekly UC meeting from the center of Ticknor Lounge alongside UC President Ava Nasrollahzadeh '16. Topics discussed in the evening included outreach to potential UC candidates and a condom dispenser initiative. By Y. Kit Wu

“The mail merge is one of our main forms of communication to the student body, and as you can imagine we did not think it would be fair if some students knew about the opportunity to run while others simply didn't check their spam,” Nasrollahzadeh said.

While all UC representative positions will be filled because of the candidate influx post-deadline, the only competitive elections will be in Lowell and Pforzheimer.

Representatives engaged in email and personal outreach over the weekend to urge their peers to run for seat vacancies in six of the 12 upperclassmen houses.

“[The emails] looked rather desperate,” said Adams House Committee Co-Chair Santiago Pardo ’16, referring to the emails sent by the UC to residents in Adams House. “It got to the point where they were using click-bait on the subject lines.”

Elections will be held from Feb. 10 at noon until Feb. 13 at noon.

The candidates are as follows:

Adams

Tamara S. Fernando ’16

Rohan Pidaparti ’17

Dunster

Samuel C. Becker ’17

Kirkland

Cybele C. Greenberg ’16

Meghamsh Kanuparthy ’16

Leverett

Oliver W. Kim ’16

Lowell

Neha Dalal ’16

Bowen Lu ’17

Matthew P. McCalla ’17

Julian S. Nunally ’17

Mac G. Schumer ’17

Pforzheimer

Gabe J. Gladstein ’17

Thomas A. Huling ’17

Tessie T. McGough ’16

Mark S. Staples ’17

Muhammed Ors ’17

Bessie X. Zhang ’17

—Staff writer Jalin P. Cunningham can be reached at jalin.cunningham@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @JalinCunningham.