SO … 2 Saturdays ago the Women’s Volleyball Team was invited over to a luncheon at the Vice President’s house. For those of you who aren’t so familiar with her, her name is Sue Henderson. She is a very sweet lady (and a very good cook, I must say!), and I very much enjoyed the afternoon. Of course, the President, James Muyskens was there as well. The reason why we are invited to these luncheons is because they want an opportunity for the student-athletes to communicate to the administration and higher authority their opinions regarding the athletic programs, life, dorms, education, extracurricular activities, etc. available at and provided by Queens College.

So if you can’t imagine, I was going crazy when I heard about this luncheon and that we were going to be able to express our opinions to the two most influential individuals that “run” the school. I was going to have the chance to say it to the people who really COULD make a difference. And what a great chance for initiation into the athletic community at QC! Go VP and P (I’ve heard the term VP for Vice President before, but what is it for President? P????) !!!!!!!! Anyway, I made mental note of everything that I had wanted to rant about for the last few months about this school – both good and bad -, and I tried to do my best to not seem like I was coming in to simply complain (because that was not my intention at all. I just think some changes are necessary, and without occasions we would never be able to make changes for the betterment of the entire community and the school). First of all, we sat down in a circle in the living room and all went around, introducing ourselves and mentioning why we chose this school, what our majors were, and where we came from.

I organized some of the main points that got brought up during this session:

1. International Students’ financial aid

2. Dorm security – the side doors of the dorm closes at 8 pm and athletes have trouble getting back into the building after practices through those doors.

3. Food services at QC closes way too early. (I added that more healthy food needs to be served at the Q cafe, and they mentioned that they had tried to have healthier options in the cafeteria, but the business didn’t do well at all.I suggested that there at least should be more awareness towards our health. Possibly add the calorie count on the menus…? And I couldn’t help but mention the overbearing prices of the food for what we get…. They at least took a note of it.)

4. Applying to CUNY. This process is (as some of you may understand) HECTIC. It’s crazy how CUNY – all 25 colleges and schools- once again, TWENTY FIVE schools are under the same admissions process. If all applicants to all 25 schools sent out their transcripts, recommendation letters, essays, applications, etc. to ONE PLACE, OF COURSE IT’S GOING TO BE CHAOTIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I think this craziness is being fixed as we speak…? I heard of some rumor that they’re changing the policy so that the admissions process is easier, but I’m not quite sure….

5. Academic advising – registration- administration….

So, the whole schpiel about this was the communication between the students and the administration. It seemed like there were so many people who are always confused about what’s going on in the school. I know they don’t like to give away the instructions of how to forward emails to your personal account, but I don’t see why. Even though they reasoned that they didn’t want to tell people how to forward emails due to regular personal email accounts filtering out certain emails, I have been getting all emails so far ever since I found out how to do it (it’s actually quite a long and complicated process. If I didn’t have specific instructions on how to do it, I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out).

If anyone, by any chance, wants to find out, let me know (comment here) and I will email it or create a new post on it.

Anyway, I think the problem is that there are so many emails in a day from QC that it takes hours just keeping up with everything. If there were specific email lists that we signed up for for subject related events, it would reduce the number of emails and thus people would actually pay more attention to them.

Hopefully whatever input we gave to the VP and P helped the school to some degree… I think it’s important for more opportunities for students to provide their two cents to be available for the betterment of the school. We need to be proactive!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Enjoy your week, another blog to come soon this week

JX