2019 is drawing to a close. That means it is time for reflection, retrospection, inflection, and introspection. How did your 2019 go? If you made any New Year’s Resolutions, did you accomplish them? Are you a better person and in a better place than you were 365 days ago?
Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know. I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions and I don’t measure my life in year-long sprints. However, 2019 has been a notably turbulent time almost since its onset for me, so I feel more than vindicated in taking a quick look in life’s rear-view mirror before somersaulting into 2020.
2019 was the year life unscrewed the brake pedal from my metaphorical car and threw it out the window. I began the year by starting my term on ΑΦΩ’s executive board in a position that ended up taking way more of my free time than I expected or really wanted. Then in March, I became President of SITTV — a position I had been instrumental in creating through my involvement in an ambitious constitutional rewrite that came to a dramatic conclusion the week before SITTV nominations were slated to open. Just after the spring semester ended in May, my friend group became engulfed in scandal and I stopped talking to some of my oldest friends at Stevens. I worked remotely on campus over the summer in a job that was actually a lot of fun. My entire fall semester has been spent trying to juggle the responsibilities of my two executive board positions with my job and classes. The end of 2019, then, is going to come with a big sigh of relief. This winter break will be a highly needed one. Next semester, hopefully, will bring me more free time. But, right now, I’m not too worried about the future. I’m more worried about the past — how I can best understand and learn from it, to hopefully not repeat its mistakes nor ignore its successes.
First, the mistakes. I’m just going to shotgun off most of my current complaints about Stevens. Most of these warrant their own column entirely, and will most likely get them eventually.
This semester was the second in a row in which I was not able to register for classes that I am required to take. This semester, I was completely unable to sign up for any humanities courses. As a Computer Science major graduating in four years, I am required to take one humanities class per semester. This is the second time now where I have been unable to register for a humanities course. Last semester there were simple none which fit in my schedule. This semester, however, there were many that fit perfectly in my schedule and aligned with my interests, but were closed by restriction. To date, I have emailed three professors asking to be signed into these courses and have not received a response from any of them. I am starting to be concerned that I will be forced, with nothing I reasonably could have done to avoid, to take summer/intersession classes at a steep cost. I’m not even sure if I would be able to afford that at this point.
The Student Government Association Budget Committee continues to completely drop the ball on the job they are assigned to do. In my dealings with them on behalf of SITTV, throughout this semester I have constantly had to deal with committee members being completely ignorant of how the school and its organizations operate. Naturally, not every committee member has perpetrated this, but the amount of times I or those I know have had to explain even basic aspects of how financing works for campus clubs only for those explanations to be ignored is annoyingly high.
Certain aspects of the Stevens administrative bureaucracy astound me in how even basic operational tasks don’t get done for extraordinary amounts of time, if they get done at all. For example, I have been waiting since April 8 for members of the Division of Facilities and Campus Operations to find me a couch SITTV is allowed to purchase — a restriction placed on us specifically because the Office of Environmental Health & Safety raised concerns in March that our current furniture was unsafe.
We still haven’t heard anything new from Stevens regarding reimbursing the money they admit they improperly took from students, which I previously wrote about on September 27. There’s my laundry list of complaints. Now, here’s what I think is really going right so far.
The Student Center finally opened on December 2, which means I can finally stop putting money into my friends’ when-is-Alexander-House-actually-going-to-open betting pool and start diverting most of my earned income into our far more risky when-is-Alexander-House-going-to-be-summarily-demolished pool. For the record, my current bet is 2027.
I still very much like the pedestrian walkway that was built on upper
campus. I live bordering the river near 13th Street, so it has become an
integral and pleasant part of my daily commute to and from campus. During my freshman year when I lived in Castle Point Hall, I would often walk on the grass hills where the walkway is currently located and would occasionally muse to my friends (who never cared as much as I did) about how they should really build a sidewalk precisely where I was walking. Somehow, I think they managed to get the subtle curvature of my average path just right. I’m almost suspicious.
The Gateway Academic Complex (at least the south building, which is to date the only one I have entered) is absolutely fantastic, and a breath of fresh air after two years of cramped floor-sitting in classes in North. I have 6 hours per week of class in GS 216, and I really do believe that, from both a design and functional standpoint, the building is great enough to justify the extended delay this semester in its construction and availability.
Probably most importantly, nothing else has gone horribly wrong this semester. I only had one class cancelled due to campus construction this semester, and was only almost run over by a truck driving between Babbio and Morton once (for the record, whoever controls those barricades, please put the barricade on the street side of the exterior Babbio stairwell. Someone could really get hurt there). The clubs I am most involved in, such as The Stute and SITTV, haven’t collapsed or even really been harmed in any permanent way by the cataclysmic fallout from the early-August hack or ongoing issues with post-Jacobus office life. Considering how loudly I would be willing to yell if things were worse, I’m fairly comfortable sitting back now and giving minor applause to all the things that didn’t break this year.
I guess that about sums up my strongest 2019 feelings about Stevens. Some of them, as I’m sure anyone who is heavily involved on campus can readily see, are thoughts that are repeated over and over again by students here. I was briefed on the horrors of registration by my Peer Mentor during orientation (some of you probably haven’t even heard the term Peer Mentor — the position was abolished years ago and combined with Orientation Leader to become what is now known as “Peer Leader”). Meanwhile, the Babbio Center for Technology Management was so well-received that SITTV produced a 28-minute long tour of it when it first opened. Something I have often heard repeated during late nights at the Stute office is that “Stevens… Stevens never changes.” It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if somewhere deep in the Stute archives was written the complaints of then-students about the ongoing construction of the Jacobus Center, a building whose widely anticipated (and, in some circles of the student body, greatly appreciated) demolition last year itself led to very negative feelings from some affected groups.
What does that mean for 2020, and for those of us who are still here? Well, from my point of view, not much. Most of us only have three to five years here, and despite how cyclical the history of this university may seem to those who spend all year in the archives, it really is in our best interests as paying students to advocate for anything that will reasonably give us a better experience before we graduate and lobby against anything that will reasonably cause more harm than good. Also, I feel that we have an obligation to those students 60 years from now who’ll spend their nights in old Stutes to try and give them the best Stevens experience they can.
That’s it. That’s my New Year’s Resolution for you all. I’ll end the 2019 series of The Friday Observer with this quote that I said half out of exhaustion to a friend of mine over Thanksgiving break:
Life sucks, but at least it’s life.
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