2025 Lakeside Committee Elections

Eligibility

Voting:  Any resident may vote in the elections. More information will be provided in the town hall meeting on September 30, 2025.

Candidacy:  Any resident may run for any office, subject to any constraints in the description of the position they are running for in Article III of the Committee Constitution. No resident may run for more than one office simultaneously.

Nominations for Candidacy:  All nominations should be directed to the Lakeside Committee (lakesidecomm@princeton.edu) and should be accompanied by a personal statement and (at your discretion) a photo to be posted online.

Timeline

September 23:  Current committee chair announces the call for nominations through email

September 30:  Nomination period begins. Last town hall before election.

October 13:  Nomination Ends and Candidates Announced
Nominations for candidacy end at 5:00 pm. Candidates for election are announced.

October 14: Online voting opens on October 14, and closes at 5:00 pm on October 27.

October 28: Town Hall & Election Meeting (4:00 pm)
Candidates deliver statements and in-person voting is conducted. This would also be the final chance to vote. At the conclusion of the meeting, election results are announced.  If there are any ties, they will be broken by an immediate run-off election.

Positions

Descriptions of the eight Committee positions may be found in Article III of the Committee Constitution.

Nominees for Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer, and External Relations Delegate must be enrolled Princeton University graduate students. Nominees for Chair must also have completed at least one term of service on the Lakeside Committee.  The other four positions may be occupied by any Lakeside resident.

Candidates

Once the nomination period is open, candidates’ names, photos, and campaign statements will be posted below.

Chair

Sophia Koval

Hi everyone! My name is Sophia Koval and I’m a G5 in molecular biology. I’ve served as Lakeside Committee secretary for the past year, and am excited to now be running for chair. As secretary, I was responsible for recordkeeping and responding to resident questions. In doing so, I became aware of some of the most common issues Lakeside residents face. Below are some of those issues and how I’ve worked to address them!

1. Neighborhood-wide HVAC issues

This year, it became abundantly clear that residents are experiencing long-term, widespread HVAC outages that can last several months. I have personally escalated this issue to the head of housing, inviting him to several meetings to discuss the subject. Over the summer, I created and distributed a resident survey where students could report any long term HVAC or maintenance outages. I then compiled that data into a powerpoint that I presented to our management company ACC, university housing officials, and Dean Lily Secora from the graduate school. I believe that this meeting and presentation made the university take these issues seriously, and money has now been earmarked for neighborhood-wide replacement of old HVAC units. That being said, these replacements will take a long time and be very invasive. I will continue to advocate for residents throughout that process, and will always fight for students to have access to the comfortable living spaces that they pay for.

2. Improving resident access to information 

Part of my job as secretary was to monitor the Lakeside email and slack channels. I was sure to answer resident questions quickly or direct them to other helpful people/resources. I wrote up instructions on how to use the Lakeside grill, and am in the process of writing up an unofficial Lakeside handbook to make it easier for residents to access answers to their frequently asked questions!

3. Improved communication and accountability from ACC

Communication between residents, our management company ACC, and university housing has been a persistent challenge. As secretary, I made sure to review past meeting minutes for any unresolved issues and added them to the next meeting’s agenda. During town halls, I pushed administrators as well as I could for more information and timelines. I believe over the course of the year, we did get more transparency on why some issues took so long to resolve. I have also pushed housing to hold ACC accountable for shortcomings, especially during long-term HVAC outages that have left units at unlivable temperatures. I will continue to push for accountability in these situations and will make sure resident voices are heard by the administrators with the power to change our experiences for the better.

I hope you will vote for me to continue this work 🙂

Vice Chair

Isabelle DeSisto

Hi everyone! My name is Isabelle DeSisto, and I’m a 5th-year PhD student in Politics from Boston, MA. Outside research, I like running, swimming, minor league baseball, and hosting overly elaborate theme parties.

This is my 4th year living in Lakeside, so I know first-hand the ups and downs of life here. Lakeside is my community: I attend nearly every town hall (missed only two last year!), submit anonymous comments regularly (if you know you know), join the book club, and take part in social events. I want to give back by serving as Vice Chair.

Why me?

  • Leadership experience: In college, I managed sustainability programs for a dorm of ~500 students. At Princeton, I’ve organized workshops, conferences, and community events.
  • Commitment to Lakeside: I already show up, listen, and participate. Now I want to help resolve some of the problems that I have experienced myself!
  • Familiarity with resident concerns: I’ve lived through the same issues many of you raise. I even ran a quantitative analysis of the past 3 months of messages on Lakeside Slack to identify the most common issues in our community. I will share this in the next meeting.

What I’d do as Vice Chair

The Vice Chair helps keep the committee running smoothly—maintaining the Constitution, tracking attendance, and supporting the Chair. But beyond the formal role, I want to push for these practical improvements, based on my own experience and your Slack comments:

  1. Accountability on HVAC & Power
    • Work with current committee members to keep pressure on ACC and Princeton.
    • Create a simple form where residents can log outages in real time so we can collect reliable data and demand transparency on response times.
  2. Community Tools & Borrowing
    • Propose a “Lakeside Lending Library” with shared items (carts, bike pumps, jumper cables, ladders, dehumidifiers).
    • Fewer desperate Slack pleas for missing carts = happier residents.
  3. Packages & Mailroom
    • Push for clearer signage, better cross-building sweeps for misdelivered packages, and more transparency about lost/missing mail.
  4. Maintenance Portal
    • Advocate for improvements to the portal: residents should know the status of requests and how long the average fix takes.
    • A little transparency can save a lot of frustration.

I’m proud to live at Lakeside and at Princeton. This is my home, and I want it to work better for all of us. I’m not afraid to advocate strongly when residents aren’t treated properly—but I’ll do so constructively and collaboratively.

If you elect me as Vice Chair, you’ll get someone who’s organized, data-minded, committed to transparency, and above all, deeply invested in making Lakeside a great place to live. Thanks for your consideration!

Secretary

Treasurer

Social Chair

Webmaster

Momin Ghaffar

Hi neighbors! My name is Momin Ghaffar, and I currently serve as the Webmaster on the Lakeside Apartments Committee. I’m running again for the Webmaster position because I’ve found it fulfilling participating on the Lakeside Apartments Committee, and I’ve immensely enjoyed helping catalyze change in our community. 

Beyond serving as Webmaster this past year, I also possess 10+ years of professional experience (yes, this means I’m quite a bit older than the average Lakeside resident!) in tech, data, and IT consulting where I’ve empowered fellow colleagues and clients alike with key information from well-maintained websites and company intranets to share documents and other critical resources via Box, OneDrive, Google Drive, SharePoint, DocuSign, etc. Not only would you be casting a vote for an experienced Webmaster, but you’d also be casting a vote for a technical point-of-contact and resource to assist with troubleshooting issues. Moreover, with my industry experience I’d like to explore opportunities to squeeze even more functionality out of the existing Lakeside Apartments web interface to deliver additional value on top of your baseline expectations of timely updates of meeting minutes, notices, and community-wide communications. It’s my belief that all of your invaluable feedback coupled with my zeal in leveraging a technical background will ultimately lead to an exceedingly engaged, informed, and digitally-empowered Lakeside community.

Thank you for taking the time to learn a bit more about me and my platform. I look forward to earning your vote again, and I look even more forward to meeting all of you!

Garden Coordinator

Josephine Wang

I’m Josephine Wang, a G6 in English. I grew up in Chicago, where my family has kept a small, urban plot for as long as I can remember. While we mainly grow plants familiar to the Korean palate (perilla, bonnet bellflowers, cheongyang peppers, dadagi cucumbers, kabocha squash, etc.), we also love our native perennials (milkweeds, prairie coreopsis, purple coneflowers, Illinois roses, to name a few!). Though our plot is small, our garden helps maintain our connection to our multiple homelands and is my family’s most beloved heirloom.

I hope to help foster the same sense of connection and stewardship for our community of gardeners, at the Lakeside community garden. Not only will I seek to best advocate for and support our gardeners, I would also like to extend our care to the environment around Lake Carnegie, as Garden Coordinator. In addition to organizing the garden, I would like to organize community cleanups of trash by the lake, to best serve all Lakeside residents.

I look forward to seeing you all by the plots!

External Relations Delegate

Election questions should be directed to the current Lakeside Committee (lakesidecomm@princeton.edu).