Student speaker to share her success story

“Over all, she has really kicked it up a notch, in my opinion, from the standard of what we have expected of Club Council presidents over the years.”

Ayungao has been training the incoming Club Council president over the last few weeks to hand over the reigns to Lakshika Ruwanpathirana.

“I love her, she’s very intense. She has a very intense personality. She follows me up, texting me in the middle of the night. She’s very eager to be trained,” Ayungao said.

Sandoval also expressed his sadness at the end of the year, leaving both his own position and all the people he had worked with.

She’s truly going to be missed next year but she’s also been training her replacement, Lakshika,” Sandoval said. “She is completely and totally dedicated to her fellow students, the student government on campus, to all the events, and she’s been an absolute pleasure to work with throughout the year.”

Being ASO president, he knows how it feels to leave an office, as Ayungao is doing.

“For me, this represents the culmination of ten years at Pierce. It’s been a huge part of my life. The past two years is when I really started getting involved with things on campus. I’m really going to miss Pierce,” Sandoval said. “I’m really going to miss all the students and professors, all the friendships and acquaintances and relationships that I’ve made over the past years here. I don’t think anyone ever completes a term of office and feels like they’ve done everything they wanted to do. I certainly don’t feel that way and for that reason, I just wish I had more time.”

Ruwanpathirana said she was excited to begin her new role but sad to see Ayungao leave.

“We organized the Spring Festival together and she helped me, explained the duties and things like that,” she said. “Mainly it’s to monitor all of the clubs, see what’s going on with them, and see if they need any help. We’re supposed to have a Club Council meeting and meet with them to see what they want and how we can help them succeed. I’m starting in fall.

I’m very, very excited. I’ve been meeting Krishna a lot to see what I have to do and it’s been really fun and I am looking forward to it.

Ayungao also expressed her sadness to leave, but is looking toward the future. She plans either to work for a year as a managing intern or transfer to U.C. Irvine. Her advice for students graduating or continuing at Pierce would be that “it’s okay to not have it all figured out. You plan as you go, you plan ahead, but if things change you adapt to those changes but at the same time looking forward to the future. Sometimes it works when things don’t go your way, you think ahead. There’s a lot of options for students and I think it’s important to realize that staying in a community college isn’t necessarily bad, as long as you learn a lot from your experience at Pierce.”