When Undergraduate Council presidential candidate David M. Darst ’04 first asked Shira S. Simon ’04 to be his running mate, she wouldn’t even consider it.

“I was set on running. I was going to run for president,” Simon says. “And then David approached me and was like, ‘I’m running for president, I want you to be my VP.’”

Many within the council considered Simon, vice-chair of the council’s influential Student Affairs Committee (SAC), a serious presidential contender. Her decision to run as a vice-presidential candidate took many by surprise.

Even more unexpected was that she would run with Darst, who has never served on the council.

“We sat at Au Bon Pain for two hours, and I saw that he was serious. No matter what, he was going to get the job done, he was going to sacrifice the next three weeks of his life just seeing this thing happen,” Simon says. “That was more efficient than I had seen in all the UC candidates combined at that point in time, so I started to believe in the ticket.”

The Businessman

Darst’s detractors say he lacks experience, but Darst maintains that his outsider status affords him a fresh view of the council’s problems.

“I think it’s very important to have a president who sees from the student perspective what’s wrong with the UC,” Darst says. “Coming from within the realm of Harvard academia and social life, and a student group and involvement perspective, I’ve seen how little the UC has done and how much I think it could do.”

Supporters see Darst’s viewpoint as helpful to the role of a president, who they say needs to see the organization holistically.

“He looks at the UC as something that could work if it were organized differently,” says council member Aaron D. Chadbourne ’06, a Darst-Simon supporter. “Other candidates are jaded, they take more pragmatic goals, but David wants to set his sights high. It’s his vision of how things should work, how things should function.”

Darst is a man on a mission. In a recent interview, after revealing he has only 10 minutes before the next meeting on his schedule, Darst launches into a whirlwind summary of his ideas, experiences and plans. The 21-year-old’s personal accomplishments are extensive.

Two years ago, he co-founded a pharmaceutical company with a team of scientists and a Harvard Business School student. Darst says the company helps drugs get to market more quickly.

“Obviously I had some failures and some successes,” Darst says. “But I learned a lot of things that you do and don’t do, and I definitely learned how to manage people in getting things done.”

Darst also helped raise nearly $250,000 for a non-profit organization he formed with students and faculty at Harvard’s Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The company helps test and market accessible tuberculosis treatments.

“For his level of experience, he is very good at understanding people and understanding the impact of his decisions,” says McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering David A. Edwards, who worked with Darst on the non-profit. “He is clearly a leader—not an autocratic leader—someone who leads by a combination of his own intelligence and his understanding of people.”