Big changes for Student Union East
September 22, 2019
In a Senate meeting on Friday Sept. 20, Student Government unanimously voted to approve a bill regarding executive branch plans to activate the first floor of the Student Union.
The legislation was developed by Student Body President John Aloszka and Vice President Nat Costello over the past several months. It encompasses plans to create a Student Involvement Center and to relocate the Lend-A-Wings student pantry to the Student Union to make it more accessible for students.
A problem noticed by universities all across Florida is that students are not getting involved in campus life, which can lead to problems like apathy, homesickness, and feeling a lack of community on campus. These problems are plaguing UNF, and Aloszka noted that they can be seen in our retention rates.
When students don’t feel like they belong on campus or are connected in any way, they end up transferring elsewhere. 25% of UNF students that transfer end up in larger Florida universities, which indicates that they are looking for the community and engagement opportunities that other universities offer. In order to help students connect on campus, the Aloszka administration proposed the Student Involvement Center.
Currently, finding a club you fit into on campus can feel like a maze, but the new center is aimed at creating a central hub to coordinate with organizations and students to produce meaningful involvement on campus. President Aloszka colloquially referred to it as a form of “in-person Tinder,” where students can be matched with organizations based on their interests.
The center will be staffed by other students with experience with involvement on campus, like club presidents, RA’s, and orientation leaders. Further, a list of phrases, such as “I don’t feel connected on campus,” will be developed and distributed to advisors, so that if a student comes to them with concerns about not feeling at home on campus, they can be connected with the Student Involvement Center. It will also involve peer mentoring, where you can chat with other students about how you can get involved, and will be located on the first floor of Student Union East.
Further plans for changing the first floor include relocating Lend-a-Wing student pantry. This is a service that first opened in April 2012 to make food and hygiene products more accessible for students. Currently located in Hicks Hall, it is a service that is intended to help struggling students but is underutilized due to lack of knowledge about it and due to its inconvenient location.
This re-vamp is definitely warranted. Research from the Data Analytics Department shows that 31% of UNF students live in poverty. The stereotype of college students living off of ramen is real and is something we often overlook. Many students at UNF are struggling with having access to a healthy meal, especially following Hurricane Dorian, where many students went without work for a week and were unable to afford groceries or rent due to lack of a paycheck
The goal of moving the pantry is to destigmatize food insecurity on campus and to make the service more accessible. It will be incorporated as part of the game room in the Student Union. To make space for it, the ping pong tables and pool tables will be relocated to the Boathouse.
The pantry will also incorporate various measures to ensure the privacy of students. For example, there will be an online request form you can submit with your N number to pick up food. There will also be a satellite office of Ozzie’s Closet located within the new center, where students can come to find business attire for projects or job interviews.
The overall budget for the projects is $222,0223 out of general reserves, and looks to be completed by early 2020. The Student Involvement Center is slated to accept its first advisory appointments on Feb. 1, 2020, and the new location of Lend-A-Wings should be ready to open its doors after winter break.
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Ki-Jana • Sep 24, 2019 at 11:51 am
Seems like a pretty ignorant move by SG.
At the start of my freshman year here at unf, I was worried I’d have a difficult time finding and making friends. Luckily I ended up finding a plethora of friends and helping found the UNF Esports Club all thanks to the gameroom. Freshman year I often brought my roommate to the the indoor pingpong tables to have a fun bonding experience and to help both of us find friends with similar interests. I also attended many gameroom tournaments that were held in the pingpong section of the gameroom where I had some of the most fun experiences of my life thanks to the amped crowd and group of friends cheering me on.
It personally hurts to know the same experiences will not be able to be had by future freshmen/students when this plan goes through. It’s a shame SG clearly has never attended a gameroom tournament or even talked to any of the 200+ members of the UNF Esports Club or any students that regularly hang out at the gameroom about this plan.
Aaron • Sep 24, 2019 at 10:58 am
How can you say that you are helping people get adjusted to campus life and events and at the same time, taking away those opportunities for campus life and events. By cutting the game room in half you are creating a plethora of problems.
Have SG ever stepped foot in the game room (other than to measure where to cut off a safe space)?
1) Oct, thrive, and socially awkward students come here to relax and fell at home in this type of environment. You are ripping away the very thing that keeps them grounded as students of the university.
2) You are essentially creating a Clubhouse situation. The pool tables and equipment at the clubhouse are not maintained, destroyed, and are terrible to use. Who’s going to maintain and update equipment in the boathouse? There’s no accountability. You’d have to make boathouse employees watch over that stuff, creating another problem of cutting down employees and student jobs because it isn’t worth it to have so many workers watch a small room.
3) Employees at the GR do people counts every 30 min. Have SG looked at the numbers? If they even cared to look, hundreds of people stream through those doors everyday. If you cut the GR, how can you fit those numbers in a room the size of a dorm room?
4) Literally anywhere else in the Union is better than essentially cutting of a sizable part of the student population. Why choose the game room? There are plenty of available spaces to choose from.
5)What kind of authority does SG to designate one safe space more important than another?
Disgruntled Student • Sep 24, 2019 at 8:02 am
So essentially, no one cares that this programming is going to effectively destroy the Game Room? When table tennis and pool are the biggest things that happen in there, creating a fissure in the community that has been formed around this WELL-USED space?
What about how the table tennis area is used to host the tournaments, which draw 40-60 students every time. What about that community, sense of belonging, school pride, student engagement?
People don’t like the school because departments don’t communicate before making massive decisions, and they have no gauge on how their ideas will affect parts of the school that they don’t interact with. Students transfer because of things like this, not because they can’t access free soap.
The Game Room is one of the most unique things about this godforsaken university, and a safe place for many OCT and Thrive students. And it’s being treated like some forgotten back closet that the inherently transitory administration of a Student Government can just do with how it pleases.
Why does SG get to make these decisions in a presumed vacuum? Voting for them to go into office shouldn’t have meant a vote to uproot the entire reason you stay on campus when your classes are over.
Kacey • Sep 24, 2019 at 2:52 am
Tone deaf plan. This will kill game room tournaments and hundreds of daily game room attendees. The Boathouse is open a whopping 45 fewer hours than the Game Room. Aloszka is manufacturing this “problem” of getting to lend-a-wing (which has shuttles running to it during all times it is open) to look like he’s helping an impoverished population and not just playing dress-up on the third floor of the SU. Shameful.