After serving one year as academic vice president, Prajwal Ciryam wants to run again. And even if he doesn’t win, he wants to serve on the academic committee as a senator and continue working on some of the same issues he did this year.
“I’m confident that before I’m 30 I will see summer financial aid at this university,” said Ciryam, a Weinberg sophomore. “I’m going to check up on it daily.”
Ciryam’s committee members and the executive board say he is one of the most passionate and determined Associated Student Government members they know. Ciryam’s sustained passion for ASG is a rarity in an organization that sometimes disillusions idealistic students who want to see change but face administrative hurdles in achieving it.
Ciryam has been persistent this year but had to drop some projects from the ambitious platform on which he was elected. He decided not to pursue reinstating NUtopia, a registration program that was once available to students in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
“It’s hard to do everything you want to do within a year,” he said. “It was hard to let those things go. In my position you have to make tough decisions on what will most benefit students.”
Ciryam spent much of his time researching, developing and presenting a plan for summer-session financial aid for those students who receive aid during the regular school year. Ciryam said that after intense lobbying, administrators are beginning to be receptive to the idea and, he hopes, will form a committee to look into the issue by the end of Spring Quarter.
“We’ve spent the year collecting data, analyzing it, putting it through the ringer, and not just looking at numbers but how it affects students,” he said. “We’ve come up with a basic roadmap to put this in place, which I think is really impressive for some random undergraduates to do.”
As a leader, Ciryam is respected for his passion and intelligence.
“At every meeting I go to I’m usually really impressed with him,” said McCormick freshman Abizer Sakarwala, a Slivka Residential College senator who serves on the academic committee. “Whenever we bring up any idea — like summer financial aid — he’ll know every single rule. He knows how the system works and he knows how to work the system.”
But some senators felt Ciryam lacked leadership skills.
McCormick junior Greg Carlson, a former off-campus senator who served on the Academic Committee for two quarters this year, said Ciryam was dedicated and hard-working but ineffective as a leader.
“He acted like another member, not a leader,” said Carlson, who resigned from Senate on Wednesday because of health reasons. “He is overly democratic. We would have meetings and he wouldn’t assign anything. He would let everyone do what they were going to do without centralized leadership.”
Carlson also said Ciryam was overextended in other non-ASG activities.
“Praj just never had time to sit down and help out and never actively sought out a role as mentor,” Carlson said.
Ciryam’s committee also worked to make improvements to CAESAR, and currently is working on replacing regular P/N with target P/N.
Ciryam said progress is less pronounced on his committee because of the nature of its work. It takes years to lobby for projects like target P/N. Mike Silver, a North Mid-Quads Hall senator and member of the Academic Committee, said Ciryam was a resource for him and other members and overall a great academic vice president.
“The only thing he could have done better was to stay on his committee to do work,” said Silver, a Weinberg freshman. “Praj, always the genial and good guy, could’ve leaned on the committee members more and if he had, we would’ve gotten (even) more done this year.”
