QUEST students can be found in leadership everywhere on campus. From the Engineering buildings to across campus at the Business School, QUEST students excel and thrive at UMD. So, it is no surprise that some of the leaders in the Student Government Association (SGA) are QUEST students!
Cohort 36’s Ayelette Halbfinger has been involved in SGA since her sophomore year. She has held numerous leadership positions, such as a legislative representative for the business school, dining services liaison, deputy communication director, speaker pro tempore, deputy chief of staff, and chief of staff. Currently, Halbfinger is the Student Body President, and she serves as the voice of undergraduate students at UMD and the internal president of SGA.
Halbfinger shared that she is most proud of “helping students brainstorm, craft, and implement solutions with real impacts on their experiences and their peers’ experiences on campus.” Although Halbfinger is not as involved intimately in any specific project as Student Body President, all initiatives get her love since they “have varying levels of impact on students from different communities, and every one of these communities is equally important to [her] as a student leader and to SGA as an entirety.” She definitely brings in her QUEST training to implement quality solutions to the real problems that students face on campus. We wish her luck with all her initiatives and the remainder of her term!
Cohort 37’s Karthik Nambiar is also a part of SGA, currently serving as the Chief of Staff. He started as a College of Computer, Mechanical, and Natural Sciences representative in his freshman year, when he worked to pass bills to benefit the community. Afterwards, he moved to the Office of Presidents to work as a Student Fees Liaison. He also has served on the Finance Committee throughout his involvement. In his current role, he has the opportunity to connect with administrators and student groups to create a better campus and continue with his affordable housing initiative from freshman year.
Nambiar’s first initiative was tackling the issue of affordable housing in the College Park area. After polling over 1,000 students on the living arrangements in College Park, he and his team conducted a formal presentation to the city of College Park to persuade for a push in reducing housing prices. This is a very exciting initiative that will take a long time, but Nambiar will continue to work on it during his time at UMD. He is also looking forward “to continuing to advocate for change in order to continue to make the University of Maryland the inclusive home we love.” We can’t wait to see the results of Nambiar’s initiatives and time in SGA!
We are excited to see the impacts of both Ayelette Halbfinger and Karthik Nambiar in College Park. We know our QUESTees will continue to improve our campus!