Less than a week after his last meeting as Undergraduate Students Association Council president, Adam Tfayli reflected on his year in office.

Tfayli, a third-year human biology and society student from Lebanon, was the 2023-2024 USAC international student representative and served as the council’s president for the 2024-2025 academic year. He spoke to Daily Bruin campus politics editor Natalia Mochernak about his journey on the council and time in office.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: Can you walk me a bit through your USAC journey? How did you get into it?

Adam Tfayli: My first experience was being a commissioner, which is a big leap, but I learned a lot during that one year. The ISR office is a relatively new office. I think I was the fourth or fifth International Student Representative, so I was building the office … and that served as a good platform for me to jump to president, which I ran for at the end of my sophomore year, and I served as my junior year.

DB: Was there a reason you decided to campaign for ISR?

AT: I was interested in representing international students. A lot of my friends are international students, and there’s a lot of issues that they face, so it’s just more so wanting to resolve a lot of those issues and get involved with campus. I was still a freshman, so I was doing everything and anything.

DB: As ISR, was there a moment you decided you wanted to become president?

AT: I wasn’t really considering it during the year. I was 18, 19 throughout my term, and I was a sophomore. It’s very untraditional for there to be a junior president … But then towards the end of my term, a lot of people started talking to me about it and encouraging me to do it. It was more so people pushing me into the position than it was me wanting it at first, and people’s encouragement as well … put me in the mindset that, ‘you should maybe think about this.’ Then, it was an unprecedented time on campus, so I thought maybe I should – and then it turned out pretty good. I won by a significant margin, which I think reflects this is what students were looking for.

DB: Why do you think you were elected as USAC president?

AT: I think it was a combination of politics and personality. It was a very unprecedented time on campus. People were looking for certain people with certain traits within the president and I think I possess those. So in terms of politics, there’s a certain political status that I had.

I’m on very good terms with a lot of student groups. I did a lot of outreach to student groups I wasn’t in contact with. I talked to them, and I still talk to them very often. It’s really hard to be close with a lot of student groups and populations when you’re on a 30,000-person campus, but I just tried doing that as much as possible.

DB: You keep mentioning the unprecedented times on campus that occurred around the same time you were running for president. Can you tell me a bit about that time, what you learned from it, and how it has affected your time as president?

AT: It was really, really hard. I think I inherited the council at a very chaotic time. Everything was all over the place. People were scared. I started my term two weeks after the encampment, so it was the aftermath of everything. But I think that inheriting the council at a chaotic time set me up pretty good for the rest of the year, because it was the hardest at the beginning, and then it started fizzling down.

A lot of my first month, or two months, was talking to a bunch of administrators, reflecting on how everything went down, how we can improve and how we can make it up to the students that were let down. That’s something I carried throughout my time. I still meet with those same administrators basically on a weekly basis, and we discuss everything that’s going on on campus.

DB: What accomplishments are you most proud of throughout your time as president?

AT: First and foremost was the wildfires, by far. We set up the Bruin Relief Initiative, which was a comprehensive relief initiative founded by UCLA students, specifically by me and the council to help affected UCLA students and to help the LA community. … We had several volunteer sites that we shuttled students to and from for two months, we had hundreds of volunteers and thousands of volunteer hours. It was a combination of that and then also collecting aid and resources on campus. We collected four or five tons worth of material that we ended up giving to shelters and different relief stations.

During the wildfires, I was also on the ground. I was here on campus helping administrators with getting information out and communication. Whenever they were going to send something out, they would run it by me and I’d help them make sure that students would receive the message in the way it was intended, because it was a very unprecedented time. It was easy for people to misinterpret what was going on.

Number two, I would say, is various campus safety measures. I think if you were to ask students, when I inherited the presidency, if they felt safe on campus – a vast majority of them would say no. So, one of my priorities was working on campus safety, and that took form in many different ways. One, was safety on the Hill. The first couple of weeks in my presidency, there was a sexual assault on the Hill…so we worked with them (UCPD) to make sure there were escorts and security officers rotating the Hill all times to make sure that there was nothing suspicious going on.

We worked to advocate for legal investigations and charges to be pressed on people that attacked the students … last year, which ended up with various arrest warrants being issued – some felony, some misdemeanor. Lastly, we continuously work with them (the UCLA administration) to ensure that police and security on campus are here to protect students and not to intimidate or threaten students. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job. I would say a lot of people feel way safer now than they did when we first started.

[Related: Charge against 1st arrest related to attacks on encampment changed to misdemeanor]

DB: What do you wish you did differently?

AT: I wish that I was more present with the students at certain times, especially during the beginning of my term. It was really easy to get caught up in the meeting rooms and in the conversations I was having with administrators, and I disregarded how much attention I should be paying to students. I wasn’t on campus, going to events, talking to people as much as I should have. And that’s something I learned more towards the middle of my term, where I started actively seeking input and advice from different students and student groups. So, if I had to change something, I would probably just do that earlier than I did – but I think that’s just something you get with experience, something you learn along the way.

DB: What have you done differently from other USAC presidents before you?

AT: There’s quite a bit. They can be summed up, one internally and two externally. Internally, I think we’ve had a very good year. We’ve had very little conflict or disputes within the council. I’ve managed to keep people on good terms with each other despite political disagreements, and that made for a very successful legislative year. We were able to pass a lot of different stuff, and that’s something that hasn’t happened, or I haven’t seen that happen in many years. During my first year on council, council was split amongst different people, and they wouldn’t work together, and that made for a very hard and unsustainable working condition for a lot of the people on council. The year before that, there was also a lot of problems. I wanted to make sure that everyone was on good terms with each other, and that took form in many different shapes. One, we were all friends with each other. We used to go out with each other and hang out with each other, which I think is very good for council homogeny and for people to be on good terms with each other.

And then two, externally, I was the first president to set up recurring meetings with various administrators – which didn’t happen before. Previously, the president would only have one meeting a quarter with the chancellor. Now, I have two a month. So I have had maybe 12 or 13 at this point – as opposed to three during the whole year, which presidents would usually have, which means that I’m on very good terms with a bunch of different administrators, including Chancellor (Julio) Frenk, Vice Chancellor Monroe (Gorden Jr.) We’re on a texting basis with each other. Whenever there’s an emergency, it makes for a very good response time on different things, and it also means that they are more responsive to students’ requests and students’ thoughts as opposed to when there might not have been as much communication between the two different parties.

DB: What kind of impact do you hope to leave at UCLA?

AT: It’s hard to leave a sustainable impact within the one year. I wish that it could have been longer. But, I do hope my impact is more of an idea than it is a physical representation of my work, especially on council. I hope that the future councils look to me as a guide as to how to run council and how to be on good terms with each other and be within each other’s good graces.

Also on campus, I tried to bridge gaps between different student groups that historically didn’t get along, and I was, to a certain extent, successful with that. I just hope that that’s the vibe that continues after I leave, especially for future presidents, if they’re seeking advice on what to do or how to be a good president.

DB: In what ways are you proud of your other council members?

AT: I didn’t know what to expect in terms of performance/work, but I’m very proud of everyone and all the work they’ve done. Everyone’s an amazing leader, they’ve all led their commissions amazingly. I could go into specifics on different people, but I’d go on for hours and hours. They all did amazing jobs at being leaders within their own rights and leading their respective offices – and then being good players within council as well and working together to ensure that different initiatives and different projects end up being seen through.

DB: Where do you think they can improve?

AT: There’s always room for improvement, but a lot of it comes with time on a job. The more you spend, the more you learn. I’m hoping for next year, given that we’re gonna have a lot of returners, they’re gonna be able to hit the ground running as soon as possible. There’s a lot of things you just pick up the more you do it, but there’s always room for improvement, and I think we’re all looking for different ways to improve and do our jobs better.

DB: How do you balance this job with also being a student and a human?

AT: They always say be a student first, but you’re never really a student first. I’m not going to lie, it’s a very, very difficult job and it has been a very, very difficult year, but it’s my friends and the different people I have met along the way that have kept me going. It’s a very rewarding job.

But I think you have to be a certain type of person to get into it, and a certain type of person to stay. It’s just very demanding. You just have to find the good in it, and there’s a lot of good, but you have to focus, you have to focus on that, and you’ll make it – it’s just a year, and then you get a dog at the end of it to reward yourself.

DB: What do you love most about UCLA as an institution?

AT: The short answer is the people, but I think that’s a cop-out answer. It’s more so the spirit of the people. Wherever you go in the world, you’re gonna find people that are amazing. But for me, so far, it’s only at UCLA, where I have found very resilient and hard working people that have experienced so much over the past couple of years that I’ve been here and they still put their head down, work and see the light.

One of our mottos is “We the optimists,” which I think is a very good representation of who UCLA attracts. Everyone that I’ve ever met at UCLA is highly optimistic, especially when dealing with tough times. We’ve seen that with the wildfires, we’ve seen that with protests, we’ve seen that with TA strikes – with so many different things.