Former Undergraduate Student Government (USG) President Christian Potter ’22 concluded his term last Monday, Jan. 24, as the first day of spring semester classes began. After Potter emailed his final report summarizing the 2021 USG term to the student body, The Daily Princetonian interviewed Potter and several of his USG colleagues, asking them to reflect on his experience in leadership, his proudest moments, and the difficulties he faced throughout the term.
According to Potter, the priority at the beginning of his term last January was to respond to the many crises surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic while still working to enact changes in underlying aspects of the student experience.
“We wanted to really deal with the pandemic and the situation that we were coming into in the spring of 2021,” he said, adding that he wanted to “find immediate solutions to a lot of pressing problems, but also deal with long-term problems.”
Potter described the task of “leading a team during a pandemic” as the biggest challenge of his presidency, as the University transitioned from the virtual landscape to an in-person fall semester in 2021.
“It’s almost night and day,” he said, comparing the two semesters of his term. “I was on Zoom for every single meeting throughout that whole [spring 2021] semester with my team. And it was really challenging to get up every day and remember that these Zooms were meaningful.”
One other challenge at the beginning of his term was the Social Contract, under which many students felt isolated.
“I think the whole campus pretty much agreed that we were in a mental health crisis in the spring, and there were record CPS appointments,” Potter explained. “We were able to successfully secure a postponement of Dean’s Date actually, which is a totally unprecedented step from the administrative perspective.”
USG Vice President Ashwin Mahadevan ’22 emphasized to the ‘Prince’ that USG had to strike a balance between working towards big-picture goals as well as managing unexpected COVID-related issues.
“We couldn’t have planned to know [what] we were going to be doing,” Mahadevan said.
He described being immersed in projects like the community dining program, and then “all of a sudden — there’s a COVID update, and we would have to respond to that.”
He told the ‘Prince’ that he hopes this year’s Senate won’t have to deal with as much crisis management and will have the time to focus on more proactive, long-term initiatives.
Despite these challenges, Potter’s colleagues praised his leadership.
Mayu Takeuchi ’23, Potter’s successor as USG President and former Sustainability Chair, told the ‘Prince’ that Potter “did a particularly great job building relationships with administrators in a way that developed trust.”
“He really helped USG move forward with advocating for the student body and in doing so earned the trust of individual students,” Takeuchi said.
In his year-end report, Potter describes conversations with department directors and various student task forces to achieve “interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary curricular paths.”
“We are nearing the extraordinary possibility that Princeton could offer minors,” the report reads.
“We were able to lay a long-term groundwork for other policy improvements in the University,“ he told the ‘Prince’. “I was Academics Chair before being USG President so that matters a lot to me.”
He also emphasized the progress his administration made towards “introducing some new sort of cross-disciplinary degree programs, including potentially minors.”
This sort of curriculum change would be a significant adjustment for the University.
“The notion that Princeton would have minors — if you told me that when I joined the Academics Committee as a first-semester freshman, I would have laughed,” Potter said.
In an interview with the ‘Prince’, Academics Chair Austin Davis ’23 highlighted additional academics-related strides in the past year. He described advocating for Zoom capability or recorded lectures for students in isolation as well as passing a midterm grading referendum with 89 percent support from the student body.
In the realm of student life, USG was also able to work towards implementing a community dining program, for which Potter “built a solid foundation,” according to Takeuchi.
The community dining program, according to the USG website, intends to “develop a long-term and financially sustainable community dining program in which students will have greater options to dine at establishments in the town of Princeton.”
Potter mentioned the human aspect of the job as one of his favorite aspects.
“My favorite thing about being president was just being able to interact with more students than ever before,” he said.
“I think my team did an amazing job with the circumstances we were dealt with [in the spring], but coming into the fall semester, we had a lot more energy,” Potter added. He said he believes that many USG members ended up becoming closer as friends just from being able to work together.
Alison Araten is a news staff writer for the ‘Prince’. She can be reached at aaraten@princeton.edu and @alisonaraten on Instagram.
Annie Rupertus is a first-year from Philadelphia and a news staff writer who covers USG for the 'Prince'. She can be reached at arupertus@princeton.edu or @annierupertus on Instagram and Twitter.
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