Meet the 2024-2025 ARISTA Executive Council

Lenny Metlitsky is a web editor for The Spectator.

As the 2023-2024 school year came to a close, now-seniors President Ayla Irshad, Vice President of Events and Service Alexa Chiang, Vice President of Operations Tamiyyah Shafiq, and Vice President of Web Development Leonid Metlitsky were selected as the new executive board of ARISTA, Stuyvesant’s Honor Society. After completing a thorough application process, the incoming council was elected by the former executive council, consisting of alumni (‘24) Vanessa Chen, Sophia Dasser, Juni Park, and Shwetlana Jha, as well as English teacher and faculty advisor Eric Ferencz.

The application process for the ARISTA Executive Council began in June with a written application detailing the applicants’ extracurriculars and new ideas for ARISTA. Applicants also participated in an interview with the previous executive board and provided a teacher recommendation letter. “It’s a very thorough review of us as students too and not just how we interact in ARISTA, but how we are in the Stuy community,” Irshad said.

Throughout the application process, Ferencz was highly impressed by students, including those who were not ultimately selected for a position on the board. “It was my first time being involved in the interview process and I was blown away by all of the applicants’ professionalism,” Ferencz said in an email interview. “We had such an amazing pool of students applying to be on the Executive Council. It’s truly a shame that we couldn't find a place for all of the applicants.”

The new members of ARISTA’s Executive Board have been working together over the past summer along with Ferencz to get started for this school year. “We’ve had meetings with Mr. Ferencz throughout the whole summer and with each other just to figure out all the initiatives we want to get done this year, because we definitely wanted to have a head start,” Irshad said. 

Each year, ARISTA holds an induction ceremony to welcome new and returning members into the organization. In addition to the ceremony, the Executive Board plans to implement an awards ceremony at the end of the school year, in which awards will be presented to members who have amassed a considerable number of volunteer hours. “We want people to feel like after they spend a year being dedicated to community service, they are able to take away something, either in the form of a certificate or just something that they are able to show for it,” Irshad said.

During this awards presentation, the current board intends to hand off their roles to the board chosen for the following school year. “We want to pass the torch onto the new executive council there, so that’d have us [start] executive council applications earlier than they were done in previous years and have the next council get a headstart on the ARISTA workload,” Irshad said. 

A special change that the Web Committee has been working on is the newly-made ARISTA website, which now works on mobile devices. Prior to this year, the website was only functional via computer, which created confusion among students relying on the interface. “The new website has essentially a focus on accessibilities and security,” Metlitsky said. “A lot of the underlying technologies on the previous website that were over 10 years old have been upgraded.”

The newly developed website also includes features that will allow ARISTA committee members to create pull requests, which refer to any stylistic changes or bug fixes, whenever they deem them necessary. “Now, the Web Committee uses a system [that] entails each committee member submitting a pull request consisting of a feature every month, so the new ARISTA website is capable of evolving in the middle of the school year,” Metlitsky said. 

The Events Committee is looking for more ways in which ARISTA members can go about gaining their volunteer hours while also establishing a sense of community within outside organizations. “We are working on promoting an initiative to have a few ARISTA-wide mandatory service events, so these members would be expected to attend in order to create stronger community bonds and expose ARISTA to the greater New York City community,” Chiang said. 

The Operations Committee is focusing on expanding ARISTA’s reach and impact through furthering marketing efforts and continuing key initiatives, particularly their partnership with the Prescod Institute for Sport, Teamwork, and Education (PISTE) program. “We want to really expand marketing this year, because it’s something that hasn’t been focused on in recent years. We also want to continue our current [tutoring partnerships] but also find ways to make them better, such as PISTE, which is expanding to another school. We want Stuy to serve as an example to the rest of the tutors and proctors who are taking part in PISTE, along with just finding more initiatives for our ARISTA members to partake in,” Shafiq said. 

In the coming year, the Executive Board as a whole aims to improve transparency toward members via increased communication with the student body. “I feel like there’s a gap between ARISTA and all of our resources and the general Stuy community,” Irshad said. “We want to make sure that everybody at Stuy knows the resources that are available and we can do that by increasing our social media presence, whether that be through Facebook or Instagram and just putting up fliers around the school.”

By implementing these new changes, the Executive Council hopes that members of ARISTA will be able to make tangible contributions to their respective communities throughout the school year. “Everyone who is part of ARISTA joins it because they want to have a part in the Stuy community and the greater NYC community,” Irshad said. “We want to make sure that they can actually have this impact.”