Improving inter-campus communication a goal of Wel

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    By CAMERON FULLER

    If elected to BYUSA’s highest offices, Greg Wells and Kim McArthur hope to improve campus communication, strengthen the student voice and expand the students’ service outreach.

    Wells is a senior from Provo majoring in graphic design and Kim McArthur is a communications graduate student from West Virginia. Both of them feel strongly about the issues they are pushing this election and the importance of students’ involvement.

    “People need to know what’s going on. They need to have an identity with the community. Part of a community is that people need to have a voice, a stake in what’s going on. If it’s not their cause, they have no association with it,” McArthur said.

    Wells and McArthur feel that improved communication on campus is necessary to establish a much needed sense of community. They also feel BYUSA needs to do a better job of keeping students informed about important events.

    Much of the information they plan to communicate from BYUSA would be to help students know what makes BYU so unique and who the people were that made it that way. The goal of such communication is to build an atmosphere and environment to which students can attach themselves, then a desire to be a part of it and then an opportunity to do it, Wells said.

    They envision several multimedia methods of presentation to communicate that sense of community. Those presentaions would include free standing posters around campus and video spots. The video spots would be shown at football and basketball games and at the Varsity Theatre before the movies begin.

    Response from the athletic department has been favorable.

    “I suppose it is possible if the administration wants to do it. It would be difficult to do during the game itself,” said Val Hale, assistant athletic director and chair of the promotion committee for events at the Marriott Center and Cougar Stadium. “If the ads were well done and conveyed a true school spirit, it would be great.”

    Hale said the spots would be best for pre-game viewing and that he is open to working with BYUSA.

    “I’m not saying its a definite yes, but it is a definite possibility,” Hale said.

    “We are not naive enough to think that we have these ideas and we can just pull them off. Our intention is to create a call for this kind of thing and start putting things in motion,” Wells said. “Its a call that I think a lot of people resonate, too. People want to know what is happening.”

    “Its not so much, in our mind, the specific elements that are so important … but the whole idea is a communication push to use every avenue available,” McArthur said.

    Wells and McArthur said they would like to work closely with the university to expand the university’s efforts to implement service learning opportunities. Wells said he envisions field-specific forms of service.

    Some examples McArthur provided of how service learning works include biology and botany majors doing trail maintenance in Uinta National Forest or engineering majors helping design homes for Habitat for Humanity.

    According to Wells, BYUSA would help identify needs outside the BYU community or even supplement college’s service efforts. This would help BYU meet its mission more effectively.

    “The point of the university is enter to learn, go forth to serve. It’s a little bit tricky to make that connection for some people, myself included. I mean, how do I make what I study help somebody else — I can see how I can make a lot of money, but I don’t see how I can raise my community yet, and maybe this can help me figure that out,” Wells said.

    McArthur tied the service learning issue to the religous purpose of the university.

    “Everyone should be using their talents and skills to do good. We talk about not once-a-week Mormons, (but) that it should be a constant goal to be a force for good in this world. This is an avenue to practice this,” McArthur said.

    They also feel the Student Advisory Council is being underutilized, and would take actions to make SAC representatives more accountable and better trained. They also want to have SAC representatives be more closely integrated with their colleges.

    “It’s not only making the SAC representatives and counsel more accountable, but also using our resources to assist them. This administraiton will be highly supportive of SAC,” McArthur said.

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