WashU has two undergraduate students and two graduate student representatives on its board of trustees. The board, composed of just above 40 members, has overseen distribution of the University’s resources since 1853. Apart from the student members, other trustees include alumni, parents, community members, and donors. The board meets in-person quarterly.

The board is composed of 10 committees, several subcommittees, and occasional ad hoc task forces. The student representatives serve a yearlong term on the “Student Experience” subcommittee, and generally report to that subgroup aside from a final meeting in May, when they present in front of the entire Board.

The current undergraduate student representatives are seniors Amaya Daniels and Sarai Steinberg, and the current graduate student representatives are Jean Brownell and Andréa Charles.

Apart from the four board meetings, student representatives are expected to meet regularly with members of the administration and serve as a liaison between the student body and the Chancellor. Graduate student representatives also are expected to attend the Graduate Professional Student Council and Graduate Professional Coordinating Committee meetings.

The application process to become a representative on the board is rigorous, with an extensive application and several rounds of interviews with former student representatives, the current chair of the board, and the former chair.

Applications to serve on the board will open in the Spring semester.

“For people who are engaged with their peers and engaged with their programs and are looking to drive change in a different way, I think this is a really good opportunity for them to do that, and I’d encourage people to apply,” Brownell said.

Daniels mentioned that she feels supported by the older board members.

“They are a good group of people, and they care deeply about this university,” Daniels said. “All of them have a tie to this university, whether it is being an alumni, donor, [parent], or a St. Louis connection — none of them are there just to show face.”

Both Daniels and Steinberg said that their main priority last semester was to make sure that the community knew who they were so that they would know who to go to with issues or suggestions. To do this, they hosted a “Meet the Reps” event and tabled at the Activities Fair. The other main project they undertook last semester was improving Dining Services, working closely with the University’s Student Union (SU).

Amaya Daniels

Amaya Daniels is a senior from Columbia, Missouri majoring in Finance, with minors in the Business of Social Impact and Urban Studies. Outside of her role as an undergraduate representative on the Board, Daniels is a Programming Manager and the interim Marketing Manager for Campus Life. She is also a Taylor Family Star Scholar and a part of the  Questbridge program.

After graduation, she plans to go into higher-education administration, and hopes to eventually become a financial advisor for low income young adults and families.

In her free time, Amaya enjoys crocheting, playing The Legend of Zelda, and traveling. She just returned from studying abroad in South Korea last semester.

Daniels’ main initiative on the board is to increase student attendance at department-led events. She hopes to do this by streamlining the process of finding events on campus, possibly through creating an online resource listing everything that is going on.

“I am mostly focused on [creating] this vision of ‘one WashU’ — creating some type of shared experience,” Daniels said.

As a small Division III school without big sports games to bring people together and encourage school spirit, Daniels strives to create a sense of unity within the school.

“There’s no centralized way of communicating about things that are happening on campus,” Daniels said.

Her project is similar to Charles’ in that she hopes to connect the student body across academic divisions, except on the undergraduate campus instead of the graduate schools.

Sarai Steinberg

Sarai Steinberg is a senior from Mountain View, California, majoring in American Culture Studies with minors in Marketing and the Business of Social Impact. Aside from her work on the Board, Steinberg is involved with Uncle Joe’s and works at the Danforth Center for Religion and Politics.

Steinberg has a job lined up at a marketing agency in New York for next year, but hopes to go into nonprofit management in the future.

In her free time, she enjoys scrapbooking, spending time with her grandparents, and hiking.

Steinberg’s main initiative on the board is to improve course evaluations and to increase student participation in these surveys. She is still in the research phase, investigating the efficacy of course evaluations at providing instructors with actionable feedback.

Steinberg has been implementing a strategy she has learned in her business classes to work on resolving this issue.

“In the B-school they always say, ‘Fall in love with the problem before you fall in love with the solution,’” Steinberg said. “It’s annoying, but it’s true — so I’m currently in the ‘talk to experts’ phase.”

Steinberg said that one strategy that has proven to be effective when presenting to the board subgroup is to present them with data from peer institutions with different kinds of programming. “They want data, they want to see what has been done at other universities, and they care what students think,” she said.

Daniels and Steinberg divide up their work, with Daniels taking point on student affairs and Steinberg taking point on the academic experience.

However, she added that she works closely with Daniels and their projects are not entirely distinct from one another. “We [work] in tandem, so it’s not like I’m off on one side and she’s over there,” Steinberg said. “I think of Amaya as my partner in crime.”

Andréa Charles

Andréa Charles is a third-year at WashU Law originally from France, near Paris. Prior to joining the Board, Charles was the Student Bar Association President and was selected to be a student representative on the search committee for the law school dean. Later this year, Charles has plans to work at a law firm in Chicago, after she completes the Illinois Bar exam.

Outside of academics and work, Charles donates her time at the Immigration Law Clinic, a group of WashU Law students who provide immigrants in the St. Louis community with free legal services.

Charles’ main initiative through her role on the board is to provide graduate students with opportunities to connect and network across schools.

“Law students feel that they belong to the law school, business students feel that they belong to the business school, engineering students feel that they belong to the engineering school — but there’s no umbrella effect,” she said. “We don’t feel that we are one graduate body.”

Charles said that she is currently collecting data to confirm that other students share this sentiment.

“My goal is to make sure that once we graduate, we have our network,” she said. “Law students will need business students once in their life, like to open a business together. We need some kind of framework to make sure that once we graduate, we have that network already established.”

Charles also said that her plan could make it easier for WashU to get back in contact with alumni for talks, donations, or other programming.

Charles said that being on the board has helped her to develop both professional skills and greater humility.

“We learn how to network and how to communicate with people who are different from [ourselves] who are also very impressive,” she said. “Though it’s a very humbling experience, it teaches me a lot.”

Jean Brownell

Jean Brownell is a third-year PhD student in the Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering Department of the McKelvey School of Engineering, originally from upstate New York. Her main research focus is on organic contaminants in drinking water, a subject area she hopes to continue to study in her professional career post-graduation. She hopes her research will influence policy for the betterment of environmental and human health.

Brownell said that her motivation to do this research is connected to the reason why she applied to be a representative on the board of trustees.

“I’m generally interested in the betterment of your own personal environment, and the betterment of conditions that people are operating in,” she said. “And so for me, this opportunity with the board is kind of a way to address that.”

Brownell’s main initiative while in this role is to make the process of providing graduate students with more accessible, comprehensive, and standardized platforms to give and receive feedback from their advisor as they progress through their program.

Prior to pursuing a PhD at WashU, Brownell studied Chemical Engineering and Sustainability at the University of Rochester. A job at Anheuser-Busch brought her to St. Louis, but the city culture is what made her want to stay.

At WashU, Brownell has also served on the EECE Graduate Student Council, the Graduate Student Academic Advisory Board, and as a McKelvey Graduate Ambassador. Off-campus, she can be found volunteering at Gateway Pets in East St. Louis, cheering loudly in the stands at a STL City or Cardinals game, or supporting local music artists at Joe’s Cafe.