indica Washington Bureau
Indian-American Sruthi Palaniappan will lead the powerful student’s body of the prestigious in 2019, an Undergraduate Council Election Commission announcement said.
Palaniappan, 20, has been elected the president of the Harvard University Undergraduate Council, and her running mate Julia Huesa will be the vice president.
The duo, which ran their campaign under the slogan “make Harvard home”, gathered 41.5 percent of the vote total approximately, easily beating second-place finishers Nadine M Khoury and Arnav Agrawal, who got 26.6 percent of the vote.
Palaniappan, whose parents migrated to the US from Chennai in 1992, plans to work on improving the Council’s communication with the student body in their initial days in office.
“I think from the onset, better structuring the way we communicate with students is something that we need to already set the tone and plan for,” she said.
“I think we’re going to work on it before we even leave for break and just get off the ground running,” Palaniappan was quoted as saying in Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper of the varsity.
Huesa added that she hopes to increase the diversity of the UC.
Palaniappan and Huesa – both longtime members of the UC – will take over the reins in December from present UC President Catherine L Zhang ‘19 and vice president Nicholas D Boucher ‘19.
Palaniappan is currently the council’s education committee chair.
In July 2016, she became the youngest delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
Her time in Philadelphia, according to an NBC News report, was packed with conferences as well as delegation and caucus meetings, visited by elected officials, party heads, and community leaders.
Palaniappan, who was accompanied by her father to Philadelphia, had said that she would want to run for office some day.
