Akshat joined Woodstock last semester with the plan to do DP with Maths AA, Physics, and Computer Science as his HLs; you can’t fake this level of nerd as Abed from Community would say. While managing his HLs without dying from the DP workload, he has integrated well into the community.

Just cause he really wanted this to be included, he had 60,000+ Spotify minutes and worships Julian Casablancas. And anyone with this type of rap sheet would be obsessed with Brooklyn 99. The fact that he loves reading would just make him a classic nerd, so his following the NBA and having Allen Iverson as his favorite player makes his case better. 

I didn’t know if this was biologically possible, but he grew his thumb back after it was cut off, and that’s a random fact about him. Also, his parents thought he got kidnapped but he thinks he was brilliant at hide and seek. That’s what a chaotic kid is – I didn’t say it, he did. 

Okay, now talking about him joining Woodstock, he mentioned how his previous school didn’t focus on building extracurriculars, but how Woodstock is different is the freedom you have to run any initiative you want to use the available resources: it’s on you to take the first step, the school won’t force it. However, he also feels that Woodstock is in a bubble and doesn’t expose the students enough; while sports at Woodstock have external exposure, that’s not the case for most activities. Organizing an inter-school cultural fest giving us opportunities to interact with other schools would make us grow out of the mould.

Being a part of the ‘old Woodstock’ discussions at Hostel, he feels that it is irrational to completely go back to how it used to be as we don’t even follow the same curriculum anymore: AP inherently gives you more flexibility which is harder with DP keeping the rigorousness in mind. Instead of focusing on mimicking how Woodstock was pre-Covid, he feels we should take the good parts and integrate them while coming up with newer ways to make the school better as we are part of an ever-changing diverse community and it doesn’t make sense to stick to a specific blueprint. About the privileges we used to have, it is something we can work on achieving. 

Currently working on the IB Survival, he wants to work towards making the transition from MYP to DP easier. But since he’s not from the same curriculum, does he really understand the shortcomings of it? Akshat’s from ICSE, a content-heavy curriculum giving him an upper hand in many aspects, however, he made the point that while there is an advantage, MYP gives you many skills that ICSE doesn’t he understands its shortcomings with after understanding what you need to manage IB. We all know the panic in every DP student, we know how large the gap between DP and MYP is and how Akshat thinks we can fix that by integrating it well through solid support programs. Right now, IB Survival is trying to actively introduce DP and the challenges faced in grade check-ins, and they plan to keep close contact with homeroom heads and DP coordinators. He feels that it is also important for the next DP 1 students to get the same gadget privileges. IB survival should be a resource for all DP students to use, taking away from the progress from failed formatives to managing it well. 

Again something that all of them talked about was transparency and effective communication, and his take on it is that when a decision is made, StuCo should explain the rationale behind that decision as even if the decision has a negative impact on someone, if explained logically, they understand where it came from and what factors led to it. “Educating the student body on what power the StuCo holds and what decisions are made by the administration is important; usually what happens is that the student body blames StuCo for decisions not made by them.” To increase communication, he wants to take a more physical approach, where instead of sending Google forms for the questions asked at the open meeting, we should allow questions to be asked in the meeting itself by removing this digital barrier. It helps people bring up important issues they wouldn’t have thought of while sending the Google form.” While I argued that it would lead to redundancy, he feels that being able to ask those questions fosters discussions. 

Asking what he identifies as strengths in other candidates that he may not possess and how he plans to compensate or differentiate, he said that how well integrated both Devyani and Neil are into the community is something he can’t compensate for but can differentiate with a newer outlook and different opinions.

Interviewed by Narayani, co-editor of The Woodstocker