Korbel ’13: Challenger criticizes USG establishment

A few of her friends stopped to say hello. But mostly, she stood alone.

Korbel has set out to defeat incumbent USG president Michael Yaroshefsky ’12, who she says has been generally effective at leading the USG. The problem, she argues, is in the institution itself — a student group that is “fundamentally flawed” due to its isolation from the broader student body it is charged with representing.

The central goal of Korbel’s campaign is to make the campus a more unified community. But finding students to join her in this effort has been a struggle.

Friday afternoon was, in a way, an anomaly for her campaign. Over much of the past week, she has been going up to students and engaging them in casual conversation, rather than waiting for them to come to her.

“I’m trying to be a human being,” she explained. “I want to get to know people as people, instead of going up to them and having them get to know me.”

Though Korbel calls herself “an average Princeton student,” she has demonstrated an activist streak in her first three semesters. She is a member of Amnesty International; Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education; and Students for Education Reform. She was also one of the roughly 20 Princeton delegates who participated in this year’s Ivy Council, which was held on campus.

Korbel is a pre-medical student and said she hopes to join Doctors Without Borders. Her major concerns about University policy regard student health and well-being services. She said that mental health services, in particular, are not sufficiently publicized, and that students who are uncomfortable reaching out for help should be more strongly encouraged to seek support.

The issue that Korbel has returned to throughout her campaign is the need to build a more inclusive community. “I believe that leadership is the ability to see within each individual the potential that they have, and then bringing that potential together to work towards a common goal,” she said.

The student body is “very apathetic towards the USG,” Korbel said. She explained that under Yaroshefsky’s leadership the group has not been “actively seeking out the people that it should be representing.”

Korbel believes that bringing together people from different backgrounds is crucial for success. “The only way to confront an issue is to approach it from all angles,” she said, adding that she aims to “actively seek out the opinion of the entire student body” through student polling and other feedback mechanisms.

Including alumni in this communitarian environment is another goal for Korbel. She hopes to work with Career Services to expand opportunities for students find internships and job listings through alumni postings online.

“These ideas that I had, I couldn’t see a way that I could change them if I just went to [President Shirley Tilghman] as a normal student,” Korbel said. “The only way I could bring these issues up was to take the big jump to run for president.”

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Korbel acknowledges the challenges facing her campaign, primarily that some people have not taken her seriously. “I’m definitely not a politician,” she said. “I don’t know how those things work.”

As someone who is more comfortable talking to people in person than reaching out to them online, she has faced another challenge at defeating the tech-savvy Yaroshefsky, who has overseen the overhaul of the USG’s web presence, first as chair of the USG Information Technology Committee and then as president.

“In high school, I wrote on typewriters,” she explained. Though a friend helped her to build a campaign website, Korbel noted that “I’m not technologically savvy. That’s a huge hurdle in trying to get elected.”

Though Korbel said the electorate is eager for specific policy advancements, she is more concerned about the big picture, recalling that “my candidate statement was hell to write, because I had to be as factual as possible, instead of talking about overarching goals.”