The Yale College Council secretary has big shoes to fill after Lauren Koster’s ’12 term this year. Koster instituted the council’s weekly newsletter, opening the organization up to the campus and getting the student body more involved.

In a crowded and accomplished field, we are endorsing Matthew Williams ’13 to follow in Koster’s footsteps. Competing against two freshmen, Caroline Smith ’14 and Obaid Syed ’14, we feel Williams has the competence and the ideas to take on the job.

Williams’ tenure on the Berkeley College Council and his experience running events including this year’s Iron Chef competition show that he knows the inner workings of the YCC.

Both Smith and Syed have had good runs on the Freshman Class Council, but they lack the know-how or the ideas to improve upon what Koster has already established. All want to make the newsletter shorter, but that is an easy fix. Some of Williams’ ideas were a little far-fetched, but in a position whose tasks are mostly set, it’s that creativity combined with his competence that makes him the best choice. We were particularly intrigued by his plan to create a mobile app for the campus, similar to ones otherwise instituted by Harvard and Stanford, which would feature the dining hall menu and Yale Facebook.

While Smith has been an active and enthusiastic member of FCC, her ideas were unoriginal. She, like all of the other candidates, agreed that the newsletter had to be shortened, and we also feel that more attention should be drawn to YCC’s website. Syed had vague concepts of expanding students’ knowledge of events around campus, but failed to show how his plans would provide more information than campus publications and the countless emails students receive from the panlists they choose to put themselves on. Williams had a better way of accomplishing what Syed hopes to do by allowing students to subscribe to interest-specific YCC emails.

We believe Williams has the best idea of what this job should be, and we are confident in his ability to engage other students and inform our campus about YCC events and initiatives.