Gent Malushaga: Running Toward a Higher Office

I first met Gent Malushaga ’25 at the Greenways basketball courts on a dimming August evening nearly three years ago. It was my first day at Amherst, and as I tried to assess how I would fit in amongst my new teammates on the cross-country team during a casual pickup basketball game, I admit I didn’t know what to make of the kid playing unnecessarily aggressive defense against me with an unfortunate buzzcut and the deepest voice I’d ever heard on a human being. Luckily, I soon learned that Malushaga’s physical play style was accompanied by a natural friendliness and cheerful demeanor that made me feel right at home in Amherst. 

In the years since our first meeting, I have come to realize the combination of passion and friendliness I saw in Malushaga that evening constitutes some of the core of his personality. His friend and teammate Luke Munch ’25 sums it up best by describing Malushaga as a “friendly face that people can talk to” in addition to “being someone that isn’t afraid or timid in all aspects of their life.” 

When designing his life at Amherst, Malushaga has certainly been anything but timid. An economics and political science major, he spent three years balancing his coursework alongside duties as an Amherst Association of Students (AAS) senator and as a member of the cross-country and track and field teams. Malushaga then spent his senior year as both president of the student body and captain of the cross-country team. 

Yet, as impressive as these titles might be, what most deserves celebrating about Malushaga’s time in college might simply be his wholehearted devotion to the Amherst community, along with his commitment to maximizing his time at Amherst and fully embodying the ideals of a liberal arts college. 

The Track to Amherst

Malushaga grew up in what he describes as the “fairly stereotypical suburb” of Larchmont, New York. Yet, he said he never fully felt like a stereotypical suburban kid. Having two parents who immigrated to the U.S., and not being raised religiously in what he describes as a town where “most people are Catholic or Jewish,” Malushaga felt slightly isolated growing up. 

Yet, he’s quick to add that the differences he felt growing up molded him in positive ways. “There was sort of a stark learning curve at certain points throughout my childhood. But I also think it was a really good opportunity to learn how to be a part of a community that you might not exactly fit into well,” he said. “I think it made me comfortable being fairly unique.” 

Surprisingly for a college athlete, Malushaga was a terribly unathletic kid. Even his beginnings as a runner were inauspicious. “I started running when I was in seventh grade, because I got cut from the basketball team, and I decided I wanted to start running track to get in shape,” he said. “I hated running. I couldn’t run without my knees hurting, and I was really slow.” 

Still, he kept on with it. After getting cut from the basketball team yet again the next year, Malushaga began a second track season and started to discover a talent he had never seen in himself before. 

“In eighth grade, I ran the 800, and I was undefeated in our league that year. And I was like, wait, this is crazy. I’ve never actually been good at a sport before,” he said. “From then on, it became my main sport.”

As Malushaga developed into a solid runner in high school, he started to consider competing at the college level. Yet, the outbreak of Covid upended his recruiting process at most schools, and he decided during his senior year to simply apply to the schools he wanted to attend, hoping that some would allow him to walk on. Amherst happened to be one of those schools, and after being admitted, Malushaga became a college runner. 

While Malushaga describes being on a team in college as “extremely transformative,” he admits that the experience was important for reasons largely unrelated to actual races. As someone who had to compete in every athletic season during the school year, he says that “having something to do every day that was hard,” even in the midst of injuries and disappointing performances, taught him invaluable lessons. 

“It’s really good to be able to do things that you don’t want to do, and to be able to find joy in difficult, long processes, especially when things aren’t going your way,” he said. 

Aside from the life lessons of “discipline, perseverance, and structure,” Malushaga also says the cross-country team gave him something of a “family” on campus.

“I think the camaraderie and the friendships I formed are the most important thing that I took away from my experience in the team,” he said. “I definitely had loftier goals coming in, and it just never really clicked for me. But as much as I would have liked to make it to Nationals or something like that, I think what I’ve gotten out of running is so much more important than any result as an individual.” 

A Student Politician

Malushaga is perhaps most widely known at Amherst for his role as AAS president. 

While he also served as the student body president of his high school, Malushaga claims he thought of student government in high school largely as a social commitment, and he didn’t originally plan on pursuing it at Amherst. A chance encounter the summer before his freshman year changed his mind. 

“I met [then-AAS President] Sirus Wheaton over the summer randomly. We’d been introduced to each other by a mutual friend. When I got to campus, he was like, you should run for AAS —  it’s a really good time, and I said ‘Why not,’ and I ran,” he said. 

While Wheaton’s encouragement may have gotten him to join the AAS, developing an appreciation for the AAS’ function is what convinced Malushaga to stick with it. Working on certain projects, such as running The Marriage Pact during his freshman and sophomore years, sparked an appreciation for “bringing things to campus that people enjoy over time.”

“It was very different than what I was doing in high school, where we mostly just organized fundraisers for the prom. I realized AAS actually plays an important role in the ongoings of the school,” Malushaga said. 

Convinced that the AAS could help make “internal changes to the way the college works,” Malushaga decided at the end of his junior year to run for president. 

In his tenure, Malushaga has focused on fostering community at Amherst at various levels, including developing a relationship between students and the Board of Trustees, advocating for changes to the school’s housing policy to help more students live with friends, and attempting to create more opportunities for seniors to be celebrated during Commencement. 

Dean of Students Angie Tissi-Gassoway, who worked closely with Malushaga on numerous projects, thinks he has been successful in accomplishing his goals as president due to his “thoughtful” nature and his dedication to the community. 

“He’s someone who really cares about making campus a better place than what he found it,” they said. “That makes me think of him as someone who really loves Amherst and feels really connected to this place.”

Under Malushaga, the senate has seen an increased focus on accountability, said Hedley Lawrence-Apfelbaum ’26, who served alongside him as AAS vice president. This year, Malushaga pushed senators to focus on their senate projects, leading to a plethora of great initiatives. 

“In previous years, sometimes people waited until the last minute. Or did something pretty small,” Lawrence-Apfelbaum said. “I think he really called that out, and I think it sets a standard that’ll last for a good amount of time.” 

Malushaga said he initially found the transition from senator to president to be a struggle. He admitted that he found his early years in the senate fun because of the opportunity it gave him to express his ideas, so much so that he thinks he developed a reputation for being “loud and proud about my opinions.” Since he could no longer vote on issues as president, he needed to shift his attention from passionately arguing his opinions to guiding the senate as a whole. “It’s something I might have struggled with at the beginning, and I’d like to think I got a lot better at by the end,” he said. 

Still, while senators have said he has fulfilled his role of effectively leading the group, it turns out that Malushaga is never entirely capable of restraining his passion for the topics he cares about. 

“He really does like to chime in during senate meetings, which previous presidents haven’t done,” Lawrence-Apfelbaum said, adding that “I think that is an important aspect to his leadership that allows him to have a real impact.” 

Yet, as outspoken as he may naturally be, Malushaga ultimately succeeded as a president by developing a complementary ability to hold space for others.

“I think he is an extraordinary leader, and I’m really proud of him,” Tissi-Gassoway said. “I’ve seen him be in conflict with other leaders, and I’ve watched him be able to listen and learn and possibly change his own approach, and I think that’s an extraordinary skill that not many students actually have.”

Indeed, Malushaga seems like a natural politician. While he has always been involved in student government, he also traces his love for politics and public policy back to his days doing model congress in high school. This naturally led him to study political science at Amherst, while he decided to concurrently study economics to “have a more quantitative way of looking at similar issues.” 

Already an accomplished student politician, Malushaga says that after graduation, he’d like to attend law school, and maybe one day “dip his toes” into real-world politics.

Coming to Love Amherst

Something I have always thought about Malushaga is that he embodies the ideals of a multi-talented, ambitious Amherst student. So I was surprised to learn in my interview with him that in his senior year of high school, he did not envision himself having the college experience he ultimately had. 

“I wasn’t that interested in Amherst,” he said. “I thought I definitely didn’t want to go to a small school in the middle of nowhere.” Malushaga ultimately ended up at Amherst largely due to a “brutal” college admissions process and Amherst’s lack of a required supplemental essay. 

“I liked the coaches when I talked to them, and I thought it was really pretty, so I thought maybe there’d be some world where I don’t get in anywhere else, and I go to this place and I try to run. And that was exactly what ended up happening,” he said.

However, in hindsight, he says Amherst has shaped him in ways he could never have imagined as a 17 year old. “I think one of the things I’ve loved so much about Amherst is that it’s small, so you actually get to know the people you’re with. It’s way easier to actually be involved,” he said. 

Expanding on this thought, Malushaga declared that one of the aspects of Amherst he found most valuable was the opportunity it gave him to pursue multiple interests he had at a high level, both in athletics and other campus activities. “I think I’m most proud of doing what I could not to get stuck on one side of campus,” he said, advising future students to try to do the same. 

“I think you’re really doing yourself a disservice if you stick to whatever it was that you thought you were coming here to do,” he said. 

Malushaga’s attitude about Amherst now is almost an inverse of the way he felt about the school coming in, something that others easily pick up on. “I just think of him as someone who’s excited to be at Amherst,” Munch said. 

As much of a positive impact Malushaga may have had on the Amherst community, whether it be through the cross-country team or the AAS, the school itself may have had an even more tremendous effect on him. 

With his time in college winding down, Malushaga affirmed this statement in our interview by reflecting on what it means to him to have dedicated so much heart to the Amherst community. He thought back to the NESCAC cross-country meet this year, where, hoping to win our first conference title in nearly a decade, we lost by a devastatingly close margin of one point. 

“We were all just so broken,” he said. Yet, Malushaga ultimately remembers the experience warmly because of the advice he received from a parent, who saw how crushed he was, and gave some words of wisdom in the form of a question: “Isn’t it awesome that you get to have something that you care so much about?”