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Archives for October 2009
Up ‘Til Dawn is a student-led, student-run program hosted by colleges and universities nation-wide. Up ‘Til Dawn unites faculty, staff, students, the surrounding community and sponsors in a goal to help the kids of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Currently, over 80 college campuses participate in this program.
The mission for Missouri State University’s chapter of Up ‘Til Dawn is a campus-wide philanthropy program to raise funds for and awareness of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Through the duration of their first year as an organization on the Missouri State University Campus, they became the 3rd top team in the nation for rasing the most money at $108,000.
Thanks to all for your help with letter writing and taking the time out of your day to donate, or making the fun trips to Panera on Panera Night. You have touched the children and parents at St. Jude. All together we have raised over $80,001 this year alone!!! This is exciting, and we thank you all again for your support.
Up ‘Til Dawn meets on Wednesdays at 4 PM in the PSU.
For more information contact: Courtney Wendel: courtney652@live.missouristate.edu.
Fellow students,
The Student Government Association is working diligently to better the academic experience at Missouri State, and we are well on our way to the implementation of key initiatives that will allow for improved publishing of academic information to students. Similarly, SGA continues to increase the methods of communication between it and the student body in hopes of obtaining greater student input on an array of issues. I hope that the realization of these two goals ultimately fosters better relationships between students and their student government, faculty, and administration.
SGA realizes the importance of remaining transparent and accountable to the student body by providing convenient and easy-to-use means of communication between SGA and students; additionally, we are constantly seeking student opinion on a variety of issues around campus and encourage students to provide input whenever possible. In an effort to meet these goals, we have reconstructed our website to allow for a better sharing of information and instituted the weekly Public Opinion Poll.
Within our website, students will be able to view published data such as the SGA budget and expenditures. Seeing as SGA is funded by the student body through a one-dollar student fee, it is appropriate and necessary that students have the ability to account for every dollar spent by SGA. Also on our website are minutes and podcasts of Senate meetings which allow you to keep track of the business conducted during Senate.
Perhaps the most important initiative thus far has been the creation of the weekly Public Opinion Poll. Each week, a new poll will be released on our website and run for a two-week period. These polls allow you to give SGA input on a variety of topics ranging from the tobacco policy of Missouri State to the naming of the Student Section in JQH Arena. We strongly encourage you to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to weigh in on issues that directly affect you.
SGA also understands that when registering for classes, students may not have the most useful information available to them. We are currently working with the Faculty Senate to revise the iGrade system which allows students to view grade distributions for a class or professor. Such a revision will include the addition of new, more useful questions to end-of-the-semester evaluations; these questions will allow students to better understand the demands of the course and expectations of the professor before registering.
I hope that you find these projects useful as a student, and I continue to encourage you to use your voice and promote the betterment of student life at Missouri State.
Christopher W. Polley and Kristen E. Sanocki
Student Body President and Vice President
Missouri State University
Students,
You may have already heard the discussion about the FY 2011 situation. Higher education in Missouri is likely to face hard budget constraints as the state of our economy continues. Missouri State University recognizes the situation we may face and is prepared to act accordingly. For some background information, many of you also remember that the state faced grave concerns about the higher education budget just last year. However, there was no need to make changes because of the one-time stimulus money that we received from the federal government. That money will not be around next year and the state’s revenues are lower than we can sustain to increase higher education funding. Cuts are likely. President Nietzel first addressed this issue during his ‘State of the University’ speech and in his first town hall forum on the budget. There will be a second town hall forum regarding the budget situation on October 28, 2009 from 3-4pm in the PSU Theater. I encourage students to attend and listen to the options we are considering in light of the budget cuts we will be facing.
All the best,
Kristen Sanocki
Student Body Vice President
The Research and Development has been hard at work at bringing new projects and ideas to Missouri State. The current projects we’re working on include: Bearline GPS tracking, improving the Missouri State website, a campus wide yard sale, joining the Tree Campus USA program, and working to get weekly polls out for the Public Opinion Poll.
Tree Campus USA
- The Tree Campus USA program would bring additional trees to campus that were lost during the great ice storm of 2007.
- We’re currently researching the requirements of the program and are in talks with various university organizations.
Campus Wide Yard Sale
- This program would allow all students to setup a table on campus towards the end of the year to sell any excess items they would like to get rid of.
- We’re looking at doing this event towards the end of April or beginning of May.
Improving MissouriState.edu
- We have begun researching our current website and will focus on how we can improve this site in various ways.
- We would like this site to be as attractive and useful to both current Missouri State and perspective students, as well as faculty and staff.
If you have any questions about the projects that R&D is working on or have a super awesome idea you can stop by our committee meetings on Tuesday’s at 4:45pm in PSU 310 or shoot me an email at thomas007@live.missouristate.edu