"More monster truck rallies."
"Wish they offered a class on the Portuguese language!"
"Tiger Transit buses are too cold! Turn the air down!"
These are a few of the more unconventional complaints written on the Student Government Association's Campaign Complain board last week.
Campaign Complain takes place twice a semester. SGA places a large board on the concourse for students to record their complaints, opinions and suggestions for improvements on campus. This semester's Campaign Complain took place Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
According to Kirby Turnage, SGA president, it is the more unusual suggestions that help SGA members get an idea of what students are concerned about on campus.
"A lot of people mentioned COMP 1000," Turnage said, "and not even complaining about the actual class, but saying, 'Hey, can we have COMP 1000 on Mac?' And I was like, I never really thought about that, but that's kind of a cool idea, you know. Are we offering opportunities for those people who are just Mac people? Why are we restricting them to the PC?"
According to Collier Tynes, student interest chairman for the SGA Senate, some complaints were more common than others.
"One popular complaint was registration," Tynes said. "Tiger i is not the most popular means of registration just because it's so confusing, so people were kind of upset about that. Of course, you're going to have the complaints about parking and dining."
Turnage said the point of Campaign Complain is to determine students' concerns and how to incorporate them into SGA's initiatives for the year.
Starting last semester, students had the opportunity to address their concerns by taking a survey in addition to writing their complaints on the board.
SGA senators stood on the concourse with iPads on which students could take the survey. The survey was also available on the SGA Facebook page.
According to Vanessa Tarpos, SGA vice president, the iPads have made it easier for SGA to evaluate student complaints.
"That's been something that I hope they continue for a lot more years because that is probably the best way to get the most information for us and just really consolidate the data," Tarpos said. "It's just really hard to get all of that information from the board, and my group did it last semester, and we just had to write everything down, calculate it manually, so the survey just makes everything easier."
Tynes said SGA was also hoping to respond to this semester's Campaign Complain with an answer board next semester.
"We found that students were just not informed on a lot of the things," he said. "There are answers to these questions and complaints that they had, so we're going to have another board that basically is in reverse where the SGA puts all these answers to why parking is not available and why dining is so expensive and normal complaints that we get."
Other concerns with less concrete answers will be taken into consideration by SGA next year when communicating with administration.
"A lot of that data we might use as administration--if we're talking to administrators, and we're saying, 'Two semesters in a row, this many students are concerned with the prices of dining or the healthy options of dining,'" Tarpos said. "We can actually use that hard data and have a graph and all of those numbers. It's not like one of us sitting there saying, 'This is the problem.' We actually have that data to back it up when we're talking to administrators."
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