Food, academics and fun are at the core of Khai-Hoan Huynh’s ’12 platform for Yale College Council vice president.

Huynh, who described the role of vice president as “the person behind the big policy projects,” said that in addition to improving dining hall food, his to-do list includes academic reform. As vice president, he said his main initiative would be to lobby the administration to allow students to take science, quantitative reasoning and language courses Credit/D/Fail while fulfilling distributional requirements; to do so, he said he would continue the current YCC executive board’s efforts on the issue. But Huynh said he thinks students taking humanities or social sciences classes should not be able to take those classes Credit/D/Fail while fulfilling distributional requirements. Huynh also said he would try to make laboratory courses worth one credit, as opposed to half a credit, because labs require the same time commitment as a regular class.

[ydn-legacy-photo-inline id=”6971″ ]

[ydn-legacy-photo-inline id=”6972″ ]

To improve food at Yale, Huynh said he would look to extending hours at Durfee’s for lunch swipes. And if elected, he said he would also propose that students receive credit for missed meals that could be used at Durfee’s. He said many students have told him they feel “ripped off by Yale” because meal swipes are not refunded if meals are missed.

“I obviously love Yale, so hearing students talk about this upsets me,” he said.

In addition, Huynh said he would e-mail the entire student body once a month to ask them what food should be served in the college dining halls. He said he would statistically analyze students’ replies and work with the administration to bring the most popular requests to the dining halls.

If he were a dining hall dish, Huynh said he would be buffalo chicken pizza — “not too hot, not too cold, just right.”

Although change will take time, he said, it can happen if students are willing to “beat [the issue] into the administration over and over again.”

To enrich campus life, Huynh said he wants to hold a low-budget music festival, featuring up-and-coming artists, during reading week first semester. He also wants to improve the YCC’s relationships with Toad’s Place and the cultural houses, he said.

Huynh said he does not think he would have problems with time commitment and that he has found that at Yale, “you really get what you put into it.”

“The first thing about Hoan is he’s one of the best friends you can have,” said Huynh’s campaign manager, Will Smith ’12. “He’s really devoted to his friends and to anyone who comes into his life.”

Huynh is focusing his platform on three areas of student life because there is only so much he could do in one year, he said. If he were to take on too many issues at once, he said he would “become lost” and would not do as good a job. He said if he thought he were able to accomplish everything on his agenda, he would also have included improving campus jobs and mental health services.