UA takes stock of year's projects

As their terms draw to a close, Undergraduate Assembly members have achieved varying levels of success with their goals, UA Chairwoman Rachel Fersh said.

While Fersh said she is proud of her year as the UA's leader and what has been achieved, some of those goals have been met with late starts and limited progress.

When Fersh took over as chairwoman last year, the College senior laid out 10 major changes she said she hoped to accomplish during her tenure.

Among the UA's biggest successes have been acquiring a music-subscription service, fostering student involvement in campus development debates and increasing UA interaction with the student body.

Those that have met with less success include lobbying for improvements to the course registration process, pressuring the University to make facilities repairs and making the University Council more accessible to undergraduates.

The University Council is a committee of administrators, faculty and students who meet monthly to discuss campus issues.

"Other things have come up throughout the year that we decided to deliberate more than" increasing accessibility to the UC, Fersh said.

While she hoped to improve the course registration process through UA measures this year, she says that initiatives have gotten hung up in administrative bureaucracy.

She added that the necessary changes could take four to five years to complete.

"The lobbying has been done, but we've hit a lot of brick walls," Fersh said.

But some of the UA's ambitions have produced tangible results.

The UA passed a proposal that will bring Ruckus -- a free music service that provides unlimited song downloads for Windows users -- to Penn students next year.

The initiative is still awaiting final approval from Provost Ron Daniels. However, he has expressed support for the service, UA member and College sophomore Sunny Patel said.

The UA established a development committee that worked with graduate students to form a presentation on what students want to see built on the 24 acres of land east of campus which will be acquired from the U.S. Postal Service next year.

They presented these opinions to the administrative committee involved in campus development as well as to Sasaki Associates Inc., the architectural firm which Penn has hired to plan development of the postal lands.

Fersh also said that the Sasaki representatives who heard the presentation noted that the student input they received from Penn was the best student involvement the firm had seen after working with many universities on development.

According to Fersh, other goals have fallen somewhere in between full and limited success.

"We've made some serious headway" on a recycling program for Greek and off-campus housing, Fersh said. "We did a lot of ... research about past programs and city ordinances."

However, no additional recycling bins have been purchased and the project remains in its beginning stages.

"There's sill a long way to go," Green Campus Partnership Director and College sophomore Bonnie Waring said. "A lot of students want to recycle but don't know how."

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