Candidate Krithik Varghese

“For senior year, a lot of the things are special to it being our last year, our last memories together. Experiencing our last memories of Irvington together, that’s what I want to do next year.”

Interview by Darsh Singhania

Transcribed by Serena Yeh

Darsh: If you could summarize your campaign in one word, how would you describe it? Why?

Krithik: I think the word that best describes it is unity, but I think that’s also a basic word. Basically one thing you want to reinforce, especially for senior year is it just that at this point, all of us have gone through high school, we’ve all experienced Irvington in different ways, but at the end of the day, we’re all going to be Irvington seniors. So the sense of unity between our class, between our classmates, that this is our final year to do homecoming, this is our final year for everything so this is like our final chance as a group to together experience something as Irvington seniors.

D: How are you planning to actually increase this unity?

K: So obviously it’s going to be difficult. A part of my answer is that just the fact that this is going to be our last year is going to incentivize some people enough to be more interested in events. There’s also another thing that we kind of already started doing this year and that’s something that’s probably going to translate and be more prevalent next year is just having a wider range of different types of events so I think this year, especially in like the second semester, there are different types of events so it’s not just straight fundraiser, fundraiser, fundraiser, it’s things like, oh, come here, destress, and just hang out with your friends and make Rice Krispies, that type of thing. And you’re going to see a wider range of events like that, for especially for senior year. Beyond that, I think senior year, another big thing that I want to focus on is actually appreciating the different groups we have at Irvington, and actively working with them to figure out the best ways to appreciate them and increase that unity within our class.

D: What are some specific ways you would increase this appreciation?

K: So first starters, one thing I’ve noticed even in my previous campaigns and like I’ve tried mentioning is that there are groups on our campus, for example, robotics and things like that. They’ve won competitions in the past, yet we don’t appreciate them or they’re just not as prevalent when we think of Irvington, but they should be. There are people on those teams who have been in Robotics for like four years, so like working with those groups to actually appreciate them. So different groups want to be appreciated in different ways. I don’t think just publicly showing people off works for every group, whether just surprising them on a meeting with donuts or just like actively putting them on a pedestal and telling everyone the great achievements that they’ve done, there are different ways to appreciate people, and there are different ways that I think as a group we’re going to try to do that but one thing that you have to pay attention while appreciating is “does the person want to be appreciated in a certain way?”

D: Why are you the best candidate for class officer?

K: So I think for starters, all three of us are really good candidates, but I think the thing that sets me apart right now is just that I’ve obviously had the chance to be class officer for two years, and the specific advantage that gives me is that I’m able to really understand the structure that works pretty well with class council. For a lot of the people, I’ve grown and understood a lot of their skills and abilities, so that allows me to actually use them effectively and also just organize class council and bench in such a way that we’re getting the most things done, and beyond that, within the ASG class the past three years, I pretty much gone through a lot of the jobs so whether it’s filing and conducting the forms, or actually conducting the planning process, I experienced all those types of ups and downs, so I have a very firm idea of everything that it takes to plan an event on Irvington’s campus, so that knowledge and that information is going to help me translate into the class council now, help facilitate future events for senior year.

D: How are you going to specifically gain input from your class, outside of the “popular kids” bubble that we usually see happening with class council?

K: So obviously the best way to try and do that would be hoping that we can do an application and trying harder to find the people that we usually miss out on applications, just try and get a more diversified class council. But you have to choose from the application pool, and if people don’t apply, you can’t choose from the people that don’t apply, so I think one of the things that we want to do is personally reaching out to these different groups on campus who we feel unrepresented in our class, whether that means going up to these people and asking“oh, are you interested in these events, what do you want in events that would make you more interested?” or even just sending out polls specifically for teachers or through announcements to get direct feedback. One thing that I wanted to highlight for next year is that when we’re doing these forms, it’s important that we also have some sort of incentive to do them, because the issue that just ends up happening is the people doing the forms are the people within class council or the people directly connected to class council so that just kind of messes up the sample size or just messes up the actual authenticity of the results. A lot of the forms that we put out right now are only filled out by people directly connected to class council, so obviously, giving people an actual incentive, just any type of reason, whether it’s us saying, oh, if you complete the form, then we’ll like offer you a small treat or anything like that would be a good way to get people to actually fill out our Google forms.

D: What are some specific groups you want to start reaching out to if you feel like some groups are underrepresented?

K: I don’t know if you can really quantify underrepresentation; there are definitely groups within our campus, especially the academies, from a more general outlook of it, we have three great academies within Irvington campus like ITA, CCA, SHAPE. Those three academies, we don’t actually work with them, but they put on their own events. We should help them at least put on these events or give them the support or publicity they need to put on these events. Those are groups that I would support. On a more general level, there’s a lot of people on Irvingtoon’s campus and within our class that we don’t actively talk to or they’re not part of the so-called cliques within class council, so it’s important that we’re trying to reach out to them directly to get one on one feedback or just through any other means what we’ve done before.

D: You’re in a prime position to know what should be changed, so what do you think you can directly improve on?

K: The biggest thing for me, just being part of class council, the structure that I felt that would work best for class council took just a little bit longer than what I hoped for to really get a hang of. At least at the beginning of the year, me and Audrey were trying to figure out the best way to assign work around these different types of commissions, especially if you’re working with the commission heads to optimize the commission to the best extent, so we obviously tried different things with different commissions and I think the commissions that worked the best was with Fundraising and Appreciation, where we just assigned different groups of teams to be responsible for different projects. You still get that group type feel that’s associated with class council and companionship with the class but it’s also a smaller group, so it’s more focused on each person actually having tasks and not just twelve people planning one fundraiser. I noticed that worked a lot more efficiently and just a lot better at getting people involved in class council because in past years, class council itself wasn’t involved with anything, so it’s like if class council isn’t involved, how are you going to get anyone else involved? So specifically having that structure, establishing it from the beginning of the year and setting a precedent we can hold on to for the upcoming school year, throughout the entire school year, especially since it’s senior year, we can do more events and the planning involved with that. So it’s important to have that structure in place so that we can actually delegate tasks on a regular basis and people can know what they’re doing to become accustomed to their job.

D: So moving into homecoming, what ideas do you have for homecoming that are going to be different from what we have this year?

K: Well I think homecoming, a big part of it is just dependent on the theme. Bench and everything, that’s completely dependent on what the theme is, so until that’s finalized, it’s kind of difficult to really put an idea or to be creative with just what we can do for homecoming, but I would say for the class dance and things like that… Is your question “what can we improve” or…

D: As in, what can be improved in the process of preparing for homecoming? That’s probably a better way to phrase the question.

K: Okay okay. Before the school year starts, I just wanna get a leg up on the game for class dance because especially this year, it felt like a lot of it was last minute teaching the dance to everyone. Before the school year starts, we should establish a clear plan for bench. This year it was a little more difficult because junior year there’s SATs, and just in general, on my own, I had treasury stress. A lot of people have problems balancing everything, so trying to establish that early, even if we fall behind, we can get back on track. We should set deadlines from the get-go, because only until maybe midsummer did me and Audrey realize the impact deadlines have on our tasks, and that put us behind on our schedule. But towards the end of the month, we were getting better, at delegating tasks and figuring out what needs to be down on certain days. So prior to homecoming and everything, those are the things we can work on and plan ahead of time.

D: You answered like a million questions in one question so that was really good. Class council, you talked about recruiting a little bit. Could you just generally discuss how you would change up the recruiting process and how the recruiting process would work?

K: So something that we did the past years that I actually liked, and thought it was a better, more accurate way to understand the candidates is that we did blind written applications, so that made us choose without any idea of who these people are, without any understanding of maybe how long they’ve in class council, we can actually see their raw ideas and understand what their ideas for class council are and just what they want to do for the next year. That gave us actually a clearer view of who the people we’re selecting for class council are. It comes with trying to go up these different groups who we feel are underrepresented, and encourage them to take the chance to participate because I feel also that when I talked to other people last year about applying, they’re a general stigma on this concept of our class council clique, which I think is kind of funny because class council itself is like seven or eight cliques. So just talking to these groups and understanding class council really is just a group of people on our campus who have the same goal of just trying to help our class. So if you’re interested in helping our class, and putting on the great events we do, then class council is something that is helpful for you and something that you actually want to be in, so just clearing the idea of what class council is poor, and what is being used for part of it. 

D: Ok, so shifting into a new idea, and that’s about after homecoming, generally events seem to slow down, so how are you going to both continue class bonding and add events that actually happen?

K: Post homecoming, especially for senior year, a lot of the things are special to it being, our last year, our last memories together. There are obviously some things that are tradition, like senior sunrise senior sunset, things every senior class has done, so those are things that we’re gonna continue. But having events in between, so whether it’s just like movie nights or, just generally experiencing our last memories of Irvington together, that’s what I want to do. One thing I talked about with a bunch of seniors this year was just what if we had a day where we took all our QUEST papers and threw them up in the air? That type of thing. Those are the last memories that we want to hear. And then your question was about us maintaining that, so I talked about it before but the structure, making sure that we have that efficient structure in place so that as soon as homecoming is done these commission and groups have their roles have their tasks and know what they’re working for for the coming year. And it’s obviously important for these groups and for any tasks that we do that we’re setting deadlines well in advance just so we’re not coming to the problems where students are going to have things in the way of planning events. At the end of the day, I want everyone to be able to plan events that they’re passionate about and are able to do it not just because they feel contractually obliged to do so. 

D: Mhm, that makes sense. Okay, and then last thing we’re gonna talk about is just prom. What plans do you have for prom, generally speaking?

K: I’ve actually had the opportunity to work [on prom], because the way prom is set up you have to plan significantly far in advance so I’ve already had the opportunity to set up the venue for next year, go through the booking process and everything. Prom next year is gonna be a different venue of course, but it’s also just the different types of things we’re gonna have there is going to make a different experience, maybe. It’ll be something where if you went to prom this year you’re not necessarily going to have the same prom experience as someone going next year. We’re going as seniors. Beyond that, we just need to raise awareness for prom from the beginning and early on is the big thing.

D: Will you consider having a combination prom with juniors next year or do you think this will happen?

K: I think from an economics standpoint, for the rest of Irvington it will be a combined prom. There are many reasons for that. It gives you a lot more power. The cost of venues has increased drastically to the point that prior to the combination. We could not afford to have any venues in SF, and considering that a lot of the best venues are in SF, it narrows down the options. By combining them, you expand the opportunities to bring in different aspects of prom and improve it past what it is right now, being constrained to a super small budget. In this new way, we can show everyone the cool things about prom instead of hoping that senior ball will get them to come. People will want to come to prom in their senior year and want to come.

D: How will you raise money for prom, because the cost is quite high this year ($120), especially for people of lower-income.

K: This year, combining the proms was a late process, because it wasn’t clear if we were going to do it or whether we would wait until next year. So we only really finalized it late in the process, which reduced our fundraising opportunities. So for next year, we already know how much the venue will cost and the overall ticket price, so we have a solid amount of money we need to raise to make the prom tickets as affordable as they can be. Structure will be important for the fundraising commission to bring in as much money as possible and working with the junior class to bring in money as well and combine it. Also, one thing we’ve talked about with different officers from other schools is the possibility of other schools putting together a show with Irvington, so like a senioritis with Mission San Jose, for example. This would expand our opportunities to sell more tickets and raise more money.

D: Thanks for your time Krithik.