Most MSU students, especially those that have attended or even visited another university, know that there are some tradeoffs involved when administrators boast about the small class sizes and the one-on-one consultations with advisers. One such tradeoff is that our school is far behind the times technologically.
We wouldn’t be surprised if MSU owned its own rain forest to supply all the paperwork students are forced to wade through when registering or dropping classes. At many other schools, students can log in to the university website the moment registration begins and sign up for all of their classes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
After a few semesters of signing up for classes at MSU, some students would probably find not having to wait in line at the registrar’s office an unobtainable pipe-dream. At Cameron University, a school in our very own Lone Star Conference, it’s the norm.
Another basic service offered to students at other schools such as West Texas A&M, another member of the Lone Star Conference, is a searchable student directory. MSU has a student directory, but only faculty members are permitted to use it.
For The Wichitan staff and other student media, a searchable directory would be especially useful for contacting students and verifying names, but all students would benefit greatly from such a tool.
Need the email of a student for your group project? Look it up. Need to compile a list of engineering majors to invite to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers? Just look them up.
Hopefully this can one day become a reality for MSU students, especially since a directory already exists. Students just can’t use it.
There may be concerns that a student directory could violate one’s privacy, but state schools are required under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to allow students to opt out of being included in the directory, so all one has to do is fill out a simple form and they won’t be included in the directory.
Even if student privacy wasn’t protected by FERPA, the limited amount of contact information listed on most university student directories is nothing compared to the information we post on FaceBook and other social media sites.
If university officials can start to bring MSU’s technology up to par with the status quo at other comparable universities, students would start to see that tradeoff between size and convenience become nonexistent, making MSU the best of both worlds.