After discussion amongst the executive cabinet, Point Park’s governing body decided to implement the use of Snapchat to receive student concerns ranging from subpar food service conditions to continual elevator breakdowns, pending the vote from the legislative body.
All semester, United Student Government (USG) made a greater effort to engage students to submit their concerns to USG so they can be addressed and handled.
“A lot of students…are always on Snapchat,” Gabrielle Goodfellow, USG Press Secretary, said in an interview after the meeting Monday. “Since [it’s] something that is so frequently used, we think we can get a lot of traffic through it.”
There are concerns, however, that students will abuse the social media platform by submitting irrelevant pictures to USG’s Snapchat account.
“My concerns are that we’re going to get inappropriate pictures,” Goodfellow said. “I don’t really have concerns on the USG side of it – I’m just more concerned about the Snapchats we’re going to receive. But, if we get [innapropriate snaps], we’re just going to ignore it.”
If approved by the legislative body, the new form of gathering student concerns will undergo beta testing, as per the request of Vice President Andrew LeDonne.
LeDonne wants to test Snapchat with students who senators trust to use the app appropriately before opening the platform to the entire student body.
“[We’re looking for students] that our senators might think would be engaged with it…or people who represent a regular college student.” LeDonne said in an interview after the meeting. “[If] you see that food service doesn’t have something, or that [a food service employee] isn’t wearing gloves, that’s what we want to see. We don’t want to see you at a party.”
Also at the USG meeting, Recording Press Secretary Shanah Hupp compiled the written student concerns and categorized them into a graph.
Food services, as past concerns indicate, was the category that received the most concerns. The second highest number of concerns was irrelevant comments written on concerns cards and submitted to USG, an issue Hupp is looking to fix. The third highest number of concerns received concerned the physical plant and its operations.
“We don’t have a plan in action right now, but we would like to get one by the end of the meeting today or next week,” Hupp said of the irrelevant concern submissions.
With the recent additions of written concern boxes in the West Penn Lobby and the Thayer Hall second floor computer lab, USG has received more student concerns, but interacting with students proves to be the best way to receive them, according to Hupp.
Prior to this semester, USG set up tables periodically and sat at them to receive concerns, but has since adopted a different method.
“Instead of just sitting there…going out and talking to people definitely got more concerns,” Hupp said. “We’ll definitely focus on one-on-one [conversations].”
