Can you tell us a little bit about your backgrounds? Where are you from? What are your majors? What are your primary activities outside of class?
Mimi: My name is Mimi Papathanasopoulos and I use she/her pronouns. I’m a sophomore in Berkeley College, and I am from a small town in Oregon. In the YCC, I’ve been the class president of the class of 2026 for the past two years and am currently the health and accessibility director. Outside of my work with the YCC, I’m a Berkeley College aide and a Yale tour guide, and I also work in a psychology lab.
Esha: I’m Esha Garg. I’m a sophomore in Hopper, and I use she/her pronouns. I’m studying Ethics, Politics, and Economics with Computer Science. In the YCC, I’ve been the Grace Hopper Senator for the past two years. This year, I also served as the dining deputy director on the executive board. I’m from Houston– born and raised there my entire life.
What prompted you to run for president and vice president of the Yale College Council?
Mimi: I’ve really enjoyed being part of the YCC for the past couple of years, and I’ve seen that it can be a really positive avenue for advocating for students, connecting with administration, and building community. However, I feel that there’s been a lack of actual student engagement and collaboration with organizations from the YCC. I have a vision with Esha for how we want to change the YCC, and I feel like that would be the best avenue for me to contribute to the Yale community.
Esha: Echoing Mimi, we’ve both been a really big part of the YCC for the past two years. I think it’ll be really interesting to see how student engagement can become a better part of the YCC’s mission through our administration. Overall, I truly think the YCC is the best student advocacy group on campus. We are able to get things done through our connections with administrators. Mimi and I want to prioritize increasing student engagement to do things that students want with administrators.
Can you tell us a bit more about your prior experience as it relates to how you’ll perform in your respective positions?
Mimi: I’ve had experience on both the events branch and the policy side of YCC. As sophomore class president, I helped plan class-wide events and facilitate class-wide bonding. That includes all the formals and study breaks throughout the past few years. It’s been a really great role because I’ve had experience managing a team. I’ve also gained experience in the external-facing role of meeting with administration. I meet with Dean Peck bi-weekly. It’s been really great to create trust and a relationship with the deans.
On the executive branch of the YCC, I’m the health and accessibility director this year, which has also been fantastic. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with a lot of health and accessibility-related organizations on campus. For example, my team worked with DEFY, the Disability Empowerment for Yale group, to reserve a spot for deaf and hard-of-hearing students at Spring Fling. We also secured $2,000 from the Dean’s office for Narcan and fentanyl workshops on campus, and we’ve pushed a lot for mental equity and worked with Yale Bleeds to install menstrual product dispensers across campus.
Esha: I’ve been a Hopper Senator for the past two years. In my first year, I did a lot of work with the academic team, as well as ensuring that all common rooms have furniture. My work resulted in all the sophomore suites in Hopper getting furniture over the summer. This year as a Hopper Senator, as well as a Deputy Policy Director for the dining team on the Executive Board, I’ve had a lot of really cool experiences. I’ve worked with a lot of administrators directly and have gotten to see what administrators are thinking when they’re thinking about students’ policy proposals, which has been a valuable learning experience. I’ve learned to balance ensuring policy works the way administrators want it to while also ensuring that the YCC is doing things that students want as well. I hope to leverage my experience in the Policy Branch to make a difference in the VP role.
What is the most difficult decision you made during your prior leadership positions? How did you arrive at that decision, and what was the result?
Mimi: Some of the most difficult decisions have been knowing how to communicate with administration, especially knowing when to compromise and when to continue to advocate for an issue. An example is the Dean’s extension for mental health. This is something student leaders have been pushing for for a long time because mental health wasn’t explicitly included in the Dean’s extension. We’d heard that there was a lot of inconsistency across colleges as to whether mental health-related extensions were granted. YSMHA, The Yale Student Mental Health Association, had been pushing administration for a long time to explicitly include this.
This year, my health and accessibility team and YSMHA met to understand where administration was pushing back. Administration had several concerns about adding an explicit mental health stipulation to the dean’s extension. They were worried it would open the floodgates to other reasons for an extension, but we felt, from our conversations with students, that it was a very important issue. We met multiple times with Dean Levesque, and, eventually, administration agreed to add mental health to the Dean’s extension. This policy will be in place next year.
Esha: One of the hard conversations we’re having right now with Yale Hospitality as well as our dining team is about the prices of meal plans. One of the main student concerns has been that all of the on-campus plans are the same price—whether you’re on Flex or on full. Students want a lower price meal plan that would benefit them, even though they want to live on campus. Advocating for that has been a really hard conversation because it’s been a matter of understanding where Yale is coming from in terms of their pricing plans. For example, we’ve had to consider how Yale calculates fixed costs and how they calculate points for the Bow Wow.
My team has done a lot of persistent pushing to represent what students want. We’ve done surveys to ensure that we have data to bring to administrators. There’s still a lot of pushback, but we haven’t just let it go. We’re still pushing and coming up with more and more data each meeting to show administration that this is what students want. I’ve learned the importance of having quantitative evidence that we can show to administrators to justify that students want to see certain changes happen.
Can you give us a summary of your platform?
Mimi: Our platform is all about bringing Yale together and ensuring that the YCC represents everyone. We see ourselves doing this by collaborating a lot more with student organizations and working with groups that know particular issues inside and out. We also really want to increase student engagement and outreach to students so we can better understand where community issues lie and come up with creative solutions to solve them.
Esha: Our platform has six main pillars. The first one, as we mentioned, is student engagement. The second one is funding student organizations and cultural centers. The third one is health and accessibility, which is something Mimi has worked a lot on. The fourth pillar is sustainability. The fifth pillar is New Haven Engagement, and the sixth is First Generation, Low Income (FGLI) support.
If elected, what do you hope to do with your year in office?
Mimi: Our overarching goal is to increase students’ connection with the YCC and increase our collaboration with student-led organizations. We want to create a new student engagement branch of the YCC. It will have two co-directors who are in charge of going out and meeting with the student leaders of every single organization on campus.
Esha: We’ve seen that when we have student organization support, Yale is more willing to listen because they see that students are engaged with and advocating for a change. By leveraging our connections with student organizations, we can make more impactful changes. We also want to make sure that every student feels like their voice is heard. We want to make sure that every student actually feels like the YCC has a voice for them and that we can drive impactful change for their group.
Mimi: We’ve also met with YFAM and leaders of different cultural centers. They feel that the only time the YCC reaches out to them is when we want them to advertise a program we’re doing. There’s definitely a gap in the middle that Esha and I hope to bridge. We need to reach out first to understand what cultural centers need from us.
We also want to increase institutional memory for YCC programs. A lot of the things that we pass—support for FGLI students, for example—are temporary and not necessarily guaranteed to be continued in the next YCC administration. We really want to make Yale take on some of these changes. For example, we passed a dining hall resolution where we reimbursed international students’ and FGLI students’ groceries over spring break this year. It was fantastic, but it’s not necessarily implied that the YCC will continue this program next year. We want to present this to the administration and say, “That was a temporary solution, but long term it would be great if Yale could take on this program themselves.”
Can you describe a project or idea that was implemented primarily through your efforts? What was your role? And what was the outcome?
Esha: I think one of the big ones that I worked on this year was actually keeping the dining halls open for two days after they closed for spring break. This was achieved through a lot of conversations with different people. First, I talked to Yale Hospitality to understand why dining halls were closed for two weeks. They told me it was the decision of the Dean’s Office. So then I talked to the Dean’s Office, and the Dean’s Office said, “Wait, it was Yale Hospitality.” So then I went back to Yale Hospitality and got a better understanding of what exactly happened and why dining halls were shut down, with them explaining that within our meal plans, it is actually written that dining halls are not planned to be open for breaks. I then went back to the Dean’s Office and told them what we as students think should actually happen—that we don’t actually agree with dining halls being closed. Mimi and I worked on an open letter, basically telling Yale Hospitality as well as President Salovey, Dean Lewis, and all the heads of colleges that this is what we think, and this is how it disproportionately affects student-athletes who are required to be here, international students who can’t go home, and FGLI students who can’t afford to go home.
Through our efforts, they actually ended up extending the dining hall days by two days, which is crazy, because that’s six meals. Dining hall staff had to be here to actually make sure that students would be fed for two additional days. It was really influential, because I know a lot of people who came back on Friday, and dining halls were open on FridayOn top of that, we ended up doing stipends as well.. It was a really cool effort to actually see that students were able to engage with this change.
Mimi: One thing that I worked on a lot this year is getting funding for Narcan training. I had done a little bit last year, but we wanted to continue on this effort this year. What was great is that we were actually able to meet with the administration multiple times and get funding straight from the administration not using YCC money. We secured $2,000 to purchase Narcan and collaborated with Students for Sensible Drug Policy and YEMS (Yale Emergency Medical Services). These trainings are actually being held this weekend, which is really exciting.
Another exciting thing is that there’s now going to be a precedent for the deans to actually fund these Narcan trainings in the future, and we’re currently working on mandating Frocos to be Narcan trained. One cool thing about Esha and I is that, since we’ve been in the YCC for the past two years, we can see the efforts that have been continued. At the end of the year, there are a lot of ongoing continuing efforts that have not been completed. Sometimes in the administration, all of these continued efforts can sort of be lost. Not only would we be able to include our ideas if we were elected, but we’d also continue the efforts of the past two previous administrations.
Esha: We’ve seen successful transition periods, but we’ve also seen unsuccessful transitions. So, we also know what works from different administrations and what doesn’t work. I think we’d be able to implement all of that and make sure that we are keeping the machine working.
Mimi: Leleda and Iris two years ago were the first president and VP after COVID, and they really reimagined the YCC and what it looks like. They built it from the ground up, and Esha was there for that and has seen it through.
Esha: Yeah, it’s been really cool to see the progression of the YCC to what it is now from where Leleda and Iris started two years ago.
Could you tell us about your team? Why did the two of you decide to run on a joint ticket, and what makes you a strong pair?
Mimi: I think we’d be a great team for several reasons. I think the first is our combined experience. Esha is very strong with the Senate and has done policy work for two years. I’ve also done my best to work with administration, and I’ve done more work with events as well. Combined, we make a very strong team and will be able to start working and hit the ground running on, day one, if elected.
Esha: We also understand all the branches of the YCC, which is so important. The YCC is not just the Policy Branch. It’s also the Events Branch and the Executive Board. By understanding all those different parts, I think we can make sure that the YCC is a cohesive body that is properly impacting Yale’s students.
We also have a shared vision. Both of us see the same needs for the YCC. We both see the need for more student engagement, which is so important when you have a president and VP running together.
Mimi: And we’re also just great friends, and we’ll be seeing each other a lot as well, so I’m very confident that we’ll be fantastic together.
What is your strategy leading up to election day?
Esha: I think it’s really just getting the most outreach we can. The whole point of our platform is to make sure that we are getting student engagement. One of the things we already did was talk to the SAC (Student-Athlete Advisory Committee) and leaders of cultural organizations about their needs. That’s really the main part of our platform: to see how we can make sure that our platform is representative of all student needs.
Mimi: Yeah, we’ve been sharing our ideas with students and also getting their ideas and input. I think our platform has been so collaborative. We’ve been having people add to it with their ideas so that it can be as representative of the community as possible. With our experience, we know what’s realistic and what’s not, which is really helpful because I think everything on our platform could actually get done during our administration. Overall, we want to leverage our diverse student body’s set of knowledge, skills, talents, and passions to come up with creative solutions.
Do you have any parting messages to the Yale community in advance of election day?
Mimi: I would encourage everyone to vote. Everyone’s voice really matters.
Esha: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think it’s really important to use the voice that you have during elections and during the voting process. I guess it’s just a good reminder that, together, we all are Yale.