Behold power in numbers.
After Jamison Hermann’s article was published in The College Voice on October 27, the Facebook group “Connecticut College needs more bandwidth!!” gained over 550 members, discussions were had at SGA and complaints and groans heard throughout campus, Information Services made our day last week with a campuswide email from Lee Hisle, Vice President for Information Services (IS):
“We’ve asked the Connecticut Education Network, that provides Internet access to Connecticut colleges and schools, to increase our bandwidth by 30MB as soon as possible, almost half again as much as we have now. When we have the additional 30MB in place, I’ll send out a notice, but I hope you’ll notice an improvement right away. After the increase, we will continue to monitor network bandwidth usage to determine if additional bandwidth should be planned and budgeted for in the future.”
This is already happening.
The Internet service plan at Connecticut College was limited to 70MB per second, but last Friday John Schaeffer of IS wrote on the wall of “Connecticut College needs more bandwidth” that the college was now up to 93MB and will be up to the full 100MB after registration.
Behold the possibilities if you communicate problems in constructive ways.
The power we as students have at Conn is sometimes quite surprising, and we are not always cognizant of our potential impact.
We just need to make our voices heard. With such a large Facebook following, Jamison’s article and Rachel Blitzer’s opinion piece (last week’s edition), as well as discussion at SGA, students banded together to show that this was a problem we’re passionate about resolving.
SGA had a conversation last Thursday during the Assembly meeting about our perceived lack of passion this year on some issues, despite the long laundry list of ideas we came up with at the beginning of the year of changes and additions we’d like to see on campus.
Our conclusion was something quite similar to thoughts I brought up in previous editorials – just do it.
Talking is great, but often we think too long and hard about an issue or initiative, so much so that nothing actually happens.
I’m not suggesting we start jumping into things blindly – careful consideration and research is always necessary for success.
But we should take this enthusiasm and passion and focus it on other areas of student concern. (From the culture of complaining we have here at Conn, I’m sure off the top of your head can name at least ten things you’d like to change or new things you’d like to see on campus.)
As students, we have a strong voice – let’s use it constructively.
