Associate Director: Riley Cagle

Governmental Affairs Committee Director: Dave Stewart Associate Director: Riley Cagle Meeting Recorder: Andres Zabala Meeting Location: New Kensington Council Weekend # 2

Saturday, November 4th, 2017 Call to Order: 2:46pm

 Introductions:

 Name, Campus

 New Business:

Dave: Campus Engagement. It can simple to plan it and talk about it, not as easy to implement them. These are some of the ways I came up to actually implement them. We’ll go around the room

Tyler, Behrend: Face to face. We confronted them personally with handouts.

Steve, Berks: It’s a matter of how they use the opportunities, many times they ask for something and when we give it to them they don’t take it. Also food is a huge factor.

Austin, Fayette: Food as well. However, there’s a problem with student engagement center.

Cassandra, Shenango: We have the same problem, we feel it’s because of the amount of people that graduate. And we they do it’s a small amount just because of how stressed they are with classes.

Cindy, Beaver: In beaver we have to sort of police them.

Austin, Fayette: In our case whether its common hour or something else, they just avoided it.

Dave: I feel the problem is with the students that are not here.

Lauren, Fayette: I represent the Veteran Society in our campus, and most of them don’t feel they want to be engaged. Maybe having a representative in the SGA helps.

Riley: We do this at York, maybe food trucks could help.

Ariane, Shenango: We’re not allowed to have vendors.

Cindy, Beaver: Getting the word out is the problem. Especially with residential and commuting students.

Colin, York: I had posters for 3 days, and 200 out of 1000 students showed up, which clearly means they read posters. Lehigh Valley: We implemented a mentor program. Just so that they have a point of contact.

Dave: I love this topic, but for the sake of time, we’re moving forward with exposure. It’s really worth it, people should know all of the work that we do for them. I’m meeting with Onward State and local newspapers.

Riley: Over the summer, one of the things that I really wanted to get done was dwell into local TV stations. I tried to with my local TV stations and we made it work, it fell through for some communication issues, but it’s possible.

Lauren, Fayette: We partnered with the local radio stations and the office of admissions, just to promote not only our campus, but also Penn State. I feel bringing someone, like a university official is definitely useful.

Dave: Has anyone done this? And if not, I really encourage you to do so. Now, I feel our main goal is advocacy.

Riley: We want to talk to you about our trip to Washington D.C. We met mainly with PA reps. It was a successful trip, Pell grants especially. Please have some sort of relationship with your legislator, it’s going to help you and your campus in the long run. Another thing, is military funding, it’s based on research. Even though it deals mostly with graduate students, research funding is something ti be in the lookout, that together with student loans makes our federal mission.

Dave: We have a final exercise. We’re talking a sort of difficulty that’s specific to your campus. Ust so we can get some tangible ideas.

Justice, Schuykill: We have problems with community relations, the community doesn’t seem to want our help and for us to receive help from them.

Cassandra, Shenango: For us is unity. This year there’s been a big gap, we see clusters of people not wanting to hang out. Mostly because we have incoming students that come with their group already from high school or a group that they’ve formed there already. We’re actually afraid to hold events now, we also don’t have diversity. It’s mostly high school students and adults.

Lauren, Fayette: We had a staff member, that’s really beloved on campus to hold a session where we really got to the root of our problems.

John, Dubois: Our biggest problem is not necessarily engagement, because we have a good number of students, but our problems is about the number of students we’re handling.

Riley; One question that I have is what happens when a campus keeps loosing students?

Ariane, Shenango: I know that in Shenango is possibly considering is to turn it into a nursing school just because that’s the major that hosts the majority of students in it.

Monique, Worthington Scranton: We have our advisors give us a calendar of the events happening on campus, and they give us incentives if we show up to a certain number of events throughout the year.

Shenango: Maybe it’s the rising cost of living, many students work and that’s their main concern besides academics.

 Open Forum:

Adjournment: 3:30pm