Two days before going home for Thanksgiving break, Ryan Shymansky (COL ’16) got a text.

Sara Margolis (COL ’16), the Georgetown University Student Association Secretary of Transfer Affairs, wanted meet concerning something related to GUSA. Shymansky thought he would grab coffee with Margolis at Saxby’s, probably talk about a potential workshop hosted by the Student Advocacy Office, of which Shymansky is co-director, and that would be that.

But Margolis sat Shymansky down, told him what led her to transfer to Georgetown and said why she thought she could run for GUSA’s highest position, the presidency. Then Margolis asked Shymansky to be her running mate.

“Truthfully, I was, first of all, pleased that she was running,” Shymansky said. “And that’s how the meeting started. And then she asked me to run with her, and I was even more startled.”

After Shymansky said yes, the gears of the nascent campaign started moving quickly. Preston Marquis (SFS ’16) was selected as campaign manager, a team was put together and an eventual 48-page platform was drafted. Margolis and Shymansky selected Marquis, who is GUSA treasurer and an NSO coordinator, for his calm and encouraging personality, among other attributes.

“Preston is the thread that holds our team together and ensures we stay grounded,” Margolis wrote in an email. “We knew he would do just this. Plus he’s an awesome guy and a super human.”

With some tickets having made GUSA executive ambitions clandestinely known months before, a number of people were taken aback when they heard Margolis and Shymansky were running.

“I was shocked but not surprised, just because it was so sudden,” Marquis said, referring to when he heard about the pair’s GUSA ambitions. “They were folks who took the time to think about whether or not it was the right call for them to make. They came to that realization perhaps just a little bit later than some of the other folks just because, I think, they wanted to really reflect and contemplate what they could really bring to the student government.”

Their campaign focuses on Georgetown’s marginalized student groups. Groups from the LGBTQ community to the transfer students to entrepreneurs are considered in the pair’s extensive platform.

For Margolis, fighting for marginalized groups is personal.

Margolis suffers from severe dyslexia and could not read until she was eight. She rarely talks about her learning disability because of the stigma surrounding it, but she said she feels it is an essential part of who she is.

“I think my dyslexia is one of my greatest strengths because if I weren’t dyslexic, I would not be as persevering, I would not be as hard working, I would not be as organized,” Margolis said. “These are all things that I developed as a kid as a coping mechanism. And as I’ve overcome my dyslexia, I’ve kept these traits.”

Every Sunday night, when the GUSA Cabinet convenes to give progress updates, those character traits show through in Margolis, according to friend and campaign staffer Olivia Hinerfeld (SFS ’17), who serves as undersecretary of neighborhood relations in the GUSA cabinet. Hinerfeld said that she always sat in amazement each week as Margolis listed off her accomplishments.

“I’m impressed with everybody in the cabinet,” Hinerfeld said. “People are doing a lot. But it’s always when it gets to Sara. All of us will have maybe one or two updates and then Sara has a list of maybe six major accomplishments that she’s had in the past week.”

Shymansky, Margolis’ running mate, was also impressed by Margolis’ weekly accomplishments.

“Every single cabinet meeting she’d be rattling of some list of what she has accomplished earlier that week,” Shymansky said. “It was that she either had an admitted transfer student day or she got [Residential] Living to agree to leave some rooms off for incoming transfer juniors. It kind of shocks you after a while because nobody else has that sort of regular progress.”

Margolis, who hails from North Carolina, was motivated in her job as secretary of transfer affairs by her own experience as a transfer at Georgetown. After being rejected by Georgetown during her senior year of high school, Margolis attended George Washington University before transferring to Georgetown in 2013. As a transfer, she saw a number of friends have difficult transitions.

“A lot of students, especially those from schools that are not four-year institutions, and even students who did come from four-year institutions, really struggle academically at Georgetown. They’re not given good peer advising,” Margolis said.

Margolis also said that there is a culture at Georgetown where students do not make enough of an effort to reach out to transfers. Margolis hopes to change that.

But perhaps the biggest thing that Margolis and Shymansky call for in their platform is the creation of a $5 million Student Activities Capital Campaign that would raise $2.75 million in just 5 years by partnering with campus organizations such as the Alumni Association, the Office of Advancement and the 1634 Society to solicit donations from alumni. The funds would go toward funding student groups.

“Everybody knows the problem exists,” Shymansky said referring to how student groups are currently funded. “SAC [Student Activities Commission] is going to meet 71.8 percent of funding requests this semester. That’s just insufficient. That’s 30 percent of programming ideas that are just going unsubstantiated because there’s no funding for it.”

The plan has been criticized by some students and alumni regarding its feasibility and whether it goes beyond GUSA’s reach. Another major concern is that the campaign will cause alumni donations to the university’s capital campaign to falter.

“I think there are a lot of alumni who don’t give at all because they don’t want to just give to Georgetown, they want to give to groups that they were a part of,” Margolis said in response to the criticism. “So, I think this [capital campaign] wouldn’t necessarily take away from alumni who are giving to the general capital campaign. … This taps into a whole different kind of alumni.”

Shymansky currently serves as a student representative on the Alumni Board of Governors, which gives him a unique perspective on the issue.

Margolis and Shymansky’s platform also calls for an increased $5,000 in finances for the GUSA Fund, which distributes money to student groups, including those not recognized by the university.

One of the organizations that would potentially benefit from the increased funding is Cups for Campus, a student group that plans to provide free cups for parties so that they can raise awareness about the dangers of sharing cups.

“We were talking to a group called Cups for Campus, and they’re awesome,” Shymansky said. “They want to provide free cups, basically, for parties because Solo cups are really cheap. We had a meningitis [case] earlier this year. There are serious health risks with sharing cups like that and so if you can make it so that people don’t have to budget so tightly for cups, we can kind of provide that.”

Cups for Campus co-founder Chantal Durgana (NHS ’17) said that the organization met with Margolis and Shymansky to discuss possibilities for funding from GUSA.

“I think [Margolis and Shymansky] are really qualified,” Durgana said. “When they were talking to us about their platform and what they want to try and do for students and the university, I was really impressed and really interested in the way that they want to approach student funding in general.”

Other key components of the pair’s platform, which can be found on their campaign website, include housing reform, more access to mental health resources, expansion of food options and including the cost of laundry and printing in tuition.

Now, nearly three months after their initial conversation at Saxby’s, Margolis and Shymansky are in full-swing campaign mode in anticipation of the elections at the end of this month.

“We really do believe in every single student here,” Shymansky said of his campaign. “I think that the issue is that sometimes when people talk about what is the ‘exec’ going to do on its own, I think part of the ‘exec’ functioning well is believing in students to go out and change things.”