Andrea Grass ’16 believes the most important task of the Yale College Council secretary is to streamline communication and make the organization more effective.

Grass, who currently serves as Freshman Class Council chair and as an associate member of the Yale College Council, said she would focus on internal and external communications as secretary.

“[YCC] would be my number one extracurricular commitment,” she said. “I want to see it through to the end.”

Students want easy access to the most important information from the YCC, Grass said. She hopes to revamp YCC emails to ensure they are clear, concise and readable.

Building off his experience in the FCC, Grass — who wrote the YCC’s campus safety report — wants to bolster the organization’s social media presence to advertise events and solicit student input.

“Social media has an advantage of [being] a less intrusive way to remind people of what’s going on,” she said.

For her campaign, Grass built a website to explain her platform — if elected, she hopes to lead an upgrade of the YCC website to make it more useful.

Part of her platform involves streamlining internal YCC communications. For representatives to be most effective, she said, they need to have easy access to all YCC information including studies, survey results and minutes. Grass wants to develop the website in such a way that makes internal information accessible.

She said she thinks every board has much to learn from preceding leaders. To this end, Grass hopes to help develop an organizational history that allows board members to learn from one another, an initiative she said would improve internal communication and make the YCC more effective as new members could learn from the successes and failures of previous YCC leaders.

Grass is an approachable and realistic leader, said Michael Leopold ’16, the current FCC vice-chair.

“[She’s] always just a very ethical guy with a strong moral fiber. It’s often unnoticed,” Leopold said. 

FCC Director of Outreach Brooke Eastman ’16 said Grass is one of the nicest and most genuine people she knows at Yale, adding that she would be a “crucial” part of next year’s YCC executive board if elected.

When not reading for Directed Studies, Grass plays intramural basketball for Jonathan Edwards College and watches one of her favorite TV shows at the West Wing Weekly club.

Update, March 31, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect a legal name change.