The 2025 Harvard Undergraduate Associate election voted Abdullah Shahid Sial ’27 and Caleb N. Thompson ’27 as the co-presidents for the upcoming academic year. The pair ran on a campaign to make the HUA actively student-first, resonating with voters amid campus uncertainty and demands for better campus life decisions. Sial and Thompson clinched the election by a clear majority, scoring 35.49% of the vote in the first round alone, with 691 votes.
Voting for all HUA positions for the 2025-2026 academic year was open to Harvard undergraduates from April 2-4 via the Voting Booth on the SOCO Website. All election results were determined through an instant-runoff ranked-choice voting system. The HUA Election Commission released the results in an email to the Harvard community on April 4. In addition to the co-presidents, eight other officers were elected to the upcoming HUA cabinet.
Sial and Thompson’s platform emphasized fighting for students’ best interests first: “Building an HUA That Works—For You.” They aim to empower student voices and push for student representation in key administrative decisions, as well as advocate for amenities to improve daily student life. The pair stressed that they will not be “the Administration’s Mouthpiece,” but instead engage with and support the student community.
Unlike four of the other co-presidential candidate pairs, Sial and Thompson had no prior experience with the HUA. Seeing contested issues on campus go unresolved and a lack of connection between the HUA and student body during prior administrations motivated their run for office.
“We want to be an advocate for student interests and student hopes,” Thompson said in an interview with the Independent. “It’s super important that we get student force behind the negotiations and conversations that we as presidents have with the administration. I think historically, that’s not happened as much as it should, and if the administration just sees us too going in and talking with them about these issues, like shopping week getting pushed back so much, registration having to be so early, linking groups getting taken away.”
For Sial, an international student from Pakistan, the decision to run was influenced by the Harvard Administration’s original resolution to deny winter housing for international students on full financial aid. Sial explained to the Independent that this decision broke from precedent, causing bipartisan uproar on campus—still, the student government failed to act.
“People were in consensus that this is wrong,” Sial said. “Even then, people who were [our] elected representatives of us…they refused to, at the absolute minimum, give any comments saying that what the housing office is doing is bad. And that’s when we realized there is something fundamentally wrong with this system, because this sort of thing won’t happen at any of the universities that have a powerful student government.”
The new co-presidents aim to bridge the gap between the HUA and the administration through increased transparency and dynamic communication with students. “There’s a huge disconnect…that’s a big part of our platform, and the way we’re going to do that is being way more transparent and being way more connected with the students, talking with them [and] having a forum and a newsletter, hopefully every week, that says what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what the administration is saying about different negotiations happening,” Thompson explained.
To enrich student life, the pair declared they would lobby for less administrative interference in social events, hot breakfast in every house neighborhood, extended dining hall hours and offerings, a phone version of HUID, laundry subsidies, free printing, airport shuttles, and earlier HUA semesterly grant funding timelines.
“I think if you’re an elected representative of the student body, [your] first and only responsibility is to serve the people who brought [you] in power, and that’s the responsibility, which needs to be handled with a lot of caution,” Sial said. “And more than that, it needs to be done [justly], because that’s the only reason why we won the election—because people believed in what we ran on.”
Coming from diverse backgrounds themselves—both from home and on campus—Sial and Thompson recognize the importance of elevating a mix of perspectives on the Harvard undergraduate experience. In addition to his international background, Sial studies Applied Mathematics with Physics, while Thompson grew up in a small town in western Colorado and studies Statistics and Economics. “It was quite a transition for me coming from that environment to college and understanding how difficult it’s been for me at times, hopefully, by being in a leadership position [and] contributing that new perspective and bringing good ideas about how we can make a better experience for students form my background and other backgrounds like my running mate, Sial,” elaborated Thompson.
Sial and Thompson are more than just running mates—they are close friends, too. The two met early in their first year at Harvard and bonded over conversations in Annenberg before both being sorted into Mather House. Thompson emphasized the trust and respect he had for Sial, a “lifelong friend and a brother,” especially after the two had visited and met each other’s families.
“The moment we found out that we won, Sial and I were in different parts of Mather; we ran out to the courtyard and hugged each other, and we called each other’s mothers,” Thompson shared.
Thompson commented on their platform’s strong resonance with campus: “Having occupied many different campus spaces and different organizations, [we had] a good breadth of student familiarity.” He also noted that he believed their platform resonated with international voters during a time of uncertainty regarding student visas on campus. The pair used creative Instagram content to expand their reach as well. “We had three funny videos, some of them self depreciating, and this message that people appreciated, just that we’re very serious about the work we’re doing, but we’re not taking ourselves too seriously…I think that resonated with people.” Such hopes may have been actualized by the election turnout, which with 1947 ballots cast was a 34% increase in turnout from 2024.
The two have strong visions for their transition to co-presidency. “I’m most excited to attack this with a high degree of passion and high degree of pragmatism,” Thompson said. “I care so much about the experience of students here, and that’s always what’s going to guide the decision-making on my end, is just thinking, ‘How can I make the student experience for the undergraduate body of Harvard the best that it can possibly be?’”
“We would want to echo whatever the students are feeling at the moment, and it isn’t the best of feelings,” Sial emphasized, discussing their next steps.
Sial and Thompson expressed tremendous gratitude for the support of the Harvard community during their successful campaign and beyond. Friends and communities provided help with logistics, campaigning, and preparation. “The number one thing that gave us so much success is being blessed to be surrounded by such incredible people and such an incredible team that was really serious about us getting elected and worked really hard because we were outside candidates,” Thompson said.
“We are immensely, immensely grateful for the support we got… It’s all to show that people believe in our platform, and this is something we’ll stick to, and we do want to be held accountable if we don’t,” Sial concluded.
Meena Behringer ’27 (meenabehringer@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the Independent.