According to the Boston Globe, it is a waste of our time and doesn’t do anything to improve security. Can someone please tell the Computing Center to stop asking us to change our passwords every few months or so?

Hey Everyone,

I’m sure we’re all stressed with finals or busy enjoying must deserved rest, but I just want to take this chance to do an online brainstorm for next semester. What would you like to see the SGA work on? Nothing is too big or too small.

For my part, I would like the SGA to become more active in the planning of next year’s First Year Orientation. I feel like there is never enough student involvement in the planning of these events and the SGA could do a better job of offering constructive criticism from the perspective of students that have been through the program over the last few years.

Have a Great Holiday!

Bryce

Hello,

I just wanted to let everyone know about the goings on of a relatively unknown club here at Trinity. Italian Club meets once a week on Monday nights and welcomes all to join them. If you can’t make a meeting, but still have a penchant for Italian culture (or food) here are some upcoming events:

Screening of “Ricordati di me” at i-House on November 22nd at 8 pm–food will be provided

Dinner with the Italian Department on December 9th–will be delicious

Thanks and hope to see you there,

Alex Powell, Senator 2012

WGRAC is sponsoring a state certification Sexual Assault Counselor/Advocate class this fall semester, taught by YWCA/SACS (Sexual Assault Crisis Services) staff, beginning September 9 through December 12, 5:30pm-8:30pm, Wednesday nights (and one Saturday), in Mather. Applications are due September 2; interviews will take place following the application process.

E-mail Laura.Lockwood@trincoll.edu for more information. No credit is available at this time, but it is a free class- WGRAC is covering the cost. There is limited space.

I am pleased to announce that nearly all of the original regulations concerning After Office Hours have been removed, for the sake of attracting more students to the program. Students can now take out to dinner any professor, with any number of students, any number of times. Listening to people interested in the program, I realized that there were interactions between students and faculty that AOH needed to better promote, such as in language classes, between advisers and advisees, and in small classes such as senior seminars. The revamped rules pare it down to the basics: meals with up to $20 per person off-campus and $10 on-campus, with a faculty member present. You can still get the reimbursement form at the Dean of Students Office or under the Services tab on this website.

~ Will Yale

Class ‘12 Senator and Chair of the Academic Affairs Committee

Today, Trinity officially kicked off its first time ever participating in RecycleMania, a friendly ten-week recycling competition among fellow colleges and universities used to promote recycling on campuses! Each week throughout the competition we will report the total amount of paper, cardboard, bottles, and cans collected for recycling. At the end of the competition in March, we will be judged on the total amount of recycling per capita and compared to the other participating schools. If you have any questions, or if you would like to be more involved, I urge you to contact anyone on Trinity’s Recycling Task Force (I am a member) or Karen Misbach, Trinity’s Sustainability Coordinator. Also, as the competition progresses, you can follow our status at recyclemaniacs.org.

So Trinity, get recycling!

The SGA is pleased to announce the beginning of a new program, After Office Hours, to be co-funded with President Jones. Here’s how it works:

1. 2-5 students in a particular class get together for an off-campus dinner with their professor OR a larger group (perhaps the entire class) gets together for an on-campus event involving food, with their professor.
2. Pick up a reimbursement form from Dean Alford’s office, fill it out, and return it with an original receipt.
3. Free meals! (up to $20 off campus and $10 on campus per student, with one dinner per class and three per semester per student; transportation not funded – go local!)

And that’s it. Be bold! With After Office Hours, the entire impetus to hold these dinners and events is on the individual student. The variations in ideas on how to use this money and the program itself can only grow exponentially from here. Particularly with the on-campus component, an infinite number of gatherings are possible – the food is what brings people to the the table.

If you have any questions, please email me at William DOT Yale AT trinity DOT edu. The original resolution that created After Office Hours is attached below, in case you want to look at the original source material. Look out for soon-to-come advertisements!

~ Will Yale

After Office Hours Resolution

As I’m sure some of you have already noticed, we have a third Zipcar on campus, as promised! It’s a Mazda 3 sedan, and will be parked in the Campus Safety lot. One of the Matrix vehicles that was there previously will be moved to the Mather driveway for easier access to those on the south side of campus. To reserve any of these Zipcars, just go to www.zipcar.com/trinity. The cost is only $8 an hour or $65 per day! Hooray for car sharing!

The position of SGA Vice President of Finance has opened up for next semester, and I would like to formally announce my candidacy. I love the SGA, I love this school, and I want what’s best for both.

I have served as a senator for the Class of 2011 since the first semester of my freshman year. My freshman year, I sat on the Academic Affairs committee and chaired an ad-hoc committee to address issues of sexual assault. This semester, I have sat on the Student Life committee, founded and chaired the new Student Safety and Wellness committee, and co-chaired the faculty/student Safety Advisory Group, along with David Andres, Director of Strategic Projects. Although I have never served on the SGA Budget committee, I do have institutional financial experience, having sat on the faculty Planning and Budget Council for my entire freshman year.  I also helped to establish the new Entertainment Activities Council, which you all will vote on shortly.

For as long as I’ve been on the SGA, I’ve wanted to do more. I want to help this organization grow and I want to leave Trinity better than I found it. I know it sounds cliche, but I really mean it. Outside of the SGA, I’ve been involved with the Anti-War Coalition, Trinity Zen, the African Development Coalition, and most recently, Trinity Students Organized Against Racism (T-SOAR).

All I can ask of you is your trust, and your vote. I’d love to hear from you if you have a questions for me, concerns, general issues that you’d like me to bring to the SGA, pretty much anything. I always respond to email promptly, so please don’t hesistate. Andrea.Wise@trincoll.edu

Thanks so much, and I look forward to the vote in February.

Because Bryce Blum ‘10, current SGA Executive Vice President, is going abroad to Copenhagen, I would like to announce my candidacy for the position. I plan to run to fill the vacancy in the SGA’s Winter Elections, to take place in early February. I will begin my campaign activities when I return to campus in January. I hope to earn enough votes to win, obviously, because I feel that I have the necessary experience and leadership skills for the role. My entire time with the SGA as a Senator-at-Large, 1.5 years now, I have been a Committee Chair, and thus on the organization’s Steering Board, and I have proven that I am capable of taking initiative, as well as working with my peers, to get things done for the student body. If you have any questions for me, please do not hesitate to contact me at Krystal.Ramirez@trincoll.edu. Otherwise, I encourage you to consider me for Executive Vice President and vote on either Tuesday, January 27 or Wednesday, January 28!

Interested in participating in Trinity’s first-ever campus-wide squash tournament which also happens to benefit a good cause? Then register today for the First Annual ConnPIRG Campus Climate Challenge Squash Global Warming Tournament! It’s only $15 to play, and no experience is required! For more information, contact me, Bryce Blum, or Maggie Thomas!

After seeing the high student demand Trinity’s two Zipcars have gotten, we’re adding another one! This one will be conveniently located in Mather parking lot, and we expect it to be on campus by the time we get back from winter break. If you haven’t yet signed up for a Zipcar membership, go to www.zipcar.com/trinity — it’s only $35 to start, and that amount goes towards driving credit! Zipcar is wheels when you want them, at the rate of only $8 an hour or $65 per day! Give it a try!

For the third time, I met with a person from the administration to discuss the issue of PAC access to residence halls. Amy DeBaun, Director of Residential Life, explained the history of dormitory access here at Trinity, going from keys to codes to network cards. A disdainful but strong theme iterated during the code access period was once again the sharing of codes, for which there is actual data (not made available to me, except as a citation for the fact that every month tens of PAC’s are replaced). Actually, an interesting data point brought up was the fact that during code access, access was granted to an individual only for his/her own dormitory; only since the advent of network cards was it viable to allow students universal residence hall access (i.e. due to the very nature of the cards being networked). Thinking about it in this way, the PAC dorm hall access is sort of a step backwards. Taking it from the angle of safety, I pressed the point that a student losing their ID card would be very much at risk from all sorts of malevolent forces with no way to get to the safety of the dorms especially at late night, should such a terrible circumstance ever arise. A terse but admittedly adequate response to this concern was that such a student should simply call campus security, from either a personal phone or from the “safety phones” installed around campus (yellow poles). This would actually be quite a bit troublesome, but campus security is required to assist any student in getting in to their residence halls when such troubles arise. I cannot question this logic. A major aspect of this brought up was the financial requirements needed to even undertake the project. It cost the college quite a huge amount to actually install the card networks and to continue this takes quite some resources. However, the administration holds these costs justified due to the safety they seem to provide. To actually add PAC access to dorm would require eventually going to each dorm individually and programming all of them individually to the regular inhabitants and also to reprogram every year, on a manual basis. In this sense, the network cards are easier. In addition, with the financial tragedy that we are currently experiencing and the resultant cutbacks, no such action would be technically feasible. In summation, the administration has answered rejected this venture at all levels for myriad reasons, but mostly because they believe in the cards and refuse to implement PAC access to residence halls. There is apparently little that the student body can do to sway this opinion. At this point, I am currently marginalizing this issue, for I have met with all the top people in charge of these things, and also waiting for results from the student survey.

One of the items I’ve been working on with the SGA is trying to find creative ways to foster student-faculty interaction outside of the classroom. Obviously, a major benefit of attending a small, liberal arts college like Trinity is the expanded opportunity it provides for students to converse with professors both in and out of the classroom. Although we have some ideas that we’re currently exploring, any additional suggestions on this topic would definitely be welcome. Please let us know!

Recently, I met with Colleen E. Stewart who is in charge managing ACIS (Locknetics) at our college to discuss in depth the details of residence hall access, especially as relating to entry by code instead of simply ID card. Declaring that access by codes instead of ID card would not be enacted, she stated that the main reason for this had to do with security, to the loss of convenience. Apparently, until 2002, there had been exterior building access using codes as well as card readers with magnetic stripes. However, there had been many reports of people being reckless with codes and sharing them with others, including people not even in the school despite the warning that such actions were strictly inadvisable. One incident in particular cited was that of an individual who gave the code to a “beau” and ended up having that particular code revealed across campus to quite a few people (I am not revealing the specifics). It seems that one or a few people spoiled it for everyone. In support this, statistics were also revealed that about 20-25 codes are replaced/reset per month due to complaints of compromise and “mistaken sharing”. Of course, the idea of sharing codes on this level, since codes can actually simply be passed on by word of mouth, email, or text, is one that is completely unappealing. The ACIS manager said that one of the main reasons that ID cards are required is that they can not exactly be shared easily, since they require physical presence for the proximity reader to work not just a numerical code or any such thing. Needless to say, the inconvenience of the cards are also the safety of them. Secondarily, supposedly because of the ID system, Trinity College is ranked number 23rd safest of 135 colleges according to Reader’s Digest. This obviously not a ranking the school administration would like to lose. Thirdly, the ACIS manager also iterated that the reason for having ID cards supersedes simply dorm access as ID cards are necessary for very many different actions on campus, such as food, etc, and cannot consider reasons why a student would not have it on them. It seems that in some ways accidents are not excusable? But, the main point seems to be that making dormitory access to easy for students would be making it easier for a lot of other personages to access the dorms as well, through diverse methods mostly having to do with finding out codes. Upon the last word, the ACIS manager revealed that in the future the college plans to make access to other facilities and residence halls, perhaps even rooms, more exclusively by ID cards for students and faculty. I personally am not completely convinced of the reasons provided and will seek additional information from other sources. If additional clarification is needed, please contact me as all the info presented to me is not necessarily present here.