In this assignment, I was given the opportunity to make a stance on an issue that I felt should be addressed regarding the CCNY campus .
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To: President of City College of New York
From: Yosef Zidell, Civil Engineering Student at CCNY
Subject: Navigating the CCNY campus
Date: September 8th, 2019
Thank you for taking the time to read about my thoughts and ideas regarding my current experience here at CCNY. The purpose of this memo is to find a better way to help students find their classrooms, school facilities, offices, etc. in an efficient way around City College. We currently do not have a system in place for this, and it causes confusion to the students finding their way around campus and gives a sense of unprofessionalism to the school. With a system in place, we can help eliminate a completely unnecessary yet very apparent stress that is placed on the students here and give the school a professional standard in this regard.
THE ISSUE
Popular, large schools such as CCNY have an inevitable disadvantage compared to smaller schools: They must provide enormous facilities, requiring a lot of detail needed to get from one area on campus to another. It can take more than ten minutes for a student to find their way across campus to their intended destination, and that’s if he or she knows where she is going. This in itself should be a warning sign to the possibility of navigation problems on the campus. However, the school has done nothing to contain this problem. Students are left to fend for themselves and figure out the intricate layout of the campus, which is completely unreasonable for many reasons: First off, the only reason students decide to come to college is to learn about their field of choice. They did not agree to have to learn all the complexities within the three-block radius of CCNY, and if they are, it should be a 3 credit course on its own. Secondly, because students come here solely to study and learn, it is unfair to place a stumbling block in their way of doing so. Every year, at the beginning of the new semester, students are tardy to classes, lost in the hallways trying to figure out where they made a wrong turn. It is completely unacceptable to allow students to go through such internal humiliation, especially when the school can easily address the issue. It is the school’s responsibility to provide an institution that helps students thrive in their educational goals, and to not create a more structured navigational system is to ignore that responsibility, which is completely inappropriate and unprofessional.
EFFECT
It is important to note that along with the u fairness and unprofessionalism of the current situation, it is having dangerous ramifications as well. The main effect caused by the lack of systematic navigation in CCNY is overloaded stress. Students are getting lost trying to find their intended destination on campus, and this is causing stress. A recent poll from 2016 showed that more than one-third of students felt that stress has negatively impacted their academic performance. Unnecessary stress placed on students requires energy that can otherwise be used for school related work, thereby reducing the quality of a student’s overall ability to produce. Having to figure out the maze that is CCNY is a burdensome, time-consuming, and overly stressful task that provides no benefit to the students, and ultimately assists in the degradation of their work ability. There is no excuse to ignore such an impactful problem.
RECOMMENDATION
A long-term solution to this problem is to create a mobile app for student to use that will guide them effortlessly through the twist and turns of the school. Institutions such as Deakin University and UMD have created apps that provide a detailed layout of the campus grounds. The idea is to create an app like Waze or Google Maps for the school, laying out a detailed blueprint of the entire campus and providing explicit instructions on how to get from one place to another in the most efficient way possible. In order to go through with this idea, we will need to access the campus blueprints for the general layout of the grounds. Next, we need to assign all the rooms on campus to a specific location on the blueprint. We will need to have a math team to develop an algorithm that connects each room on campus together and finds the most efficient path between any two points. Once this is done, we will need to hire an App developer to virtualize the entire plan. On top of this, we will need pictures of the entire campus, in order that when a student types into the app which classroom they are looking to go to, the app will direct the student using distinct arrows over a current, pictured location the student is standing in. This type of live location technology will be very useful in helping a student know where they are currently, not just where they need to go. Such an application would create such ease on navigating throughout the school and help students get back to focusing on their academics. If this is something the school is willing to prioritize, please get back to me via email at [email protected] and we could discuss the next steps in developing such an app, such as assembling a tech team and providing the proper funds. Thank you.
