Every time Executive Vice Presidential candidate Rishi Taparia calls Joy Yee’s Noodles in Evanston, he listens for an Indonesian accent.
One of the restaurant’s employees speaks Indonesian, and Taparia responded in the language the first time he recognized the accent. Since then, he has had several conversations with him.
“It makes me smile every time,” Taparia, a Communication sophomore, said. “It reminds me of home.”
For Taparia, home can be tricky to describe. He’s of Indian descent, but was born in Canada and grew up in Indonesia.
“Living in an expatriate situation, you have to be very open to change and very open to new things,” he said.
Eager for new experiences, the economics and communications studies major joined Associated Student Government almost as soon as he arrived at Northwestern. Now, after spending this year as a member of the executive committee, he is running unopposed for EVP. The EVP leads the executive committee, which oversees B- and T-status student groups.
Last quarter senators voted to allow B- and T- status groups to receive ASG funding, giving the executive committee new responsibilities. The committee is currently developing guidelines to distribute approximately $22,000 of funding it will have next year.
If elected, Taparia said his main focus would be putting those guidelines into practice and evaluating their effectiveness.
Developing a balance between funding and the Executive Committee’s previous responsibilities is also important, he said.
“I think it’s going to be a challenging year,” he said, “since it’s a completely new way that we’re going to be looking at B- and T-status student groups and student groups as a whole. It’ll be challenging, but I’m ready for the challenge.”
Taparia also has been working to create co-curricular transcripts that would list student’s extracurricular activities, comparable to an academic transcript that lists students’ grades. He said this could be used in a database to help student groups contact alumni who were members of their group.
Taparia said he might be running unopposed because students thought he had the experience necessary to do a good job. Executive vice president is a very specific position that targets student groups, and students not involved in ASG might be unfamiliar with the job, he said.
But running unopposed will not affect the way he campaigns, he said.
“I think it’s important that the student body knows who I am and knows that I’m accessible,” he said.
Taparia said he still plans on attending dorm munchies and meeting students around campus both this week and throughout his tenure if elected.
Weinberg sophomore Anu Gollapudi, Taparia’s campaign manager, said Taparia’s sincerity encouraged her to help him campaign.
“When he was going back and forth about deciding whether to run, he was really concerned about whether or not he’d be able to do a good job,” she said. “He just seemed so into it and concerned about being there for student groups.”
Reach Diana Samuels at [email protected].
