Kanwal Matharu ’13 has been elected to serve a four-year term on the University’s Board of Trustees as Young Alumni Trustee, representing the graduating senior class. He will officially begin his term starting on July 1.
The primary election, which included 39 seniors on the ballot, ran from March 5 through March 14. The general election took place from April 30 through May 22 and included the top three candidates from the primary election: Bruce Easop ’13, Catherine Ettman ’13 and Matharu.
Matharu is a molecular biology concentrator and a residential college adviser in Forbes College. Throughout his time at Princeton, he founded Sikhs of Princeton, co-founded Princeton Bhangra, was a member of the Naacho dance group, participated in varsity crew, worked as a Princeton Emergency Medical Technician and was a member of the Pace Council for Civic Values.
Matharu also helped organize a student petition for a new survey on sexual assault in response to the controversial debate following a Daily Princetonian report on incidents of sexual assault at the University.
“I applied because I felt like I had a very good understanding of what the undergraduate experience is like because of my involvement in various leadership positions,” Matharu said.
During an interview with The Daily Princetonian after the general election, Matharu explained that his extracurricular activities set him apart from Easop and Ettman. Matharu was not a member of the USG during his time at the University, which gave him a "bottom-up view" of the University, as he described.
Matharu explained on Friday that his bottom-up perspective has given him many individual experiences with people that have contributed to his understanding of their struggles and successes.
He explained that what he has enjoyed most about his time at the University was a trip he took to South Africa through the Office of Religious Life, in addition to the amount of knowledge and experience that he has gained from classmates, professors and administrators, which has been both “informative and formative.”
“I wish I would’ve spent more time studying and working on my academics, but then I wouldn’t have met all the people I have met,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t be the Young Alumni Trustee if I spent more time studying.”
Matharu explained that with every decision he has made during his time at the University, there has been a “trade-off.”
Matharu will attend medical school next year at the University of Texas, Houston.
Matharu said he hopes to learn more about how things function from an administrative standpoint. He said he often criticizes certain University policies as being “wrong or unfair” but suggested that this may be because he sometimes does not fully understand the reasoning behind these regulations.
“I am very excited for my fellow graduates, and I am looking forward to the four years that I will be affiliated with Princeton [as the Young Alumni Trustee] and for the rest my life," Matharu said. “It’s an amazing blessing.”
The current Young Alumni Trustees are Angela Groves ’12, Aku-Ammah Tagoe ’11, Josh Grehan ’10 and Liz Dilday ’09.
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