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When Priscila Poliana assumed the presidency of UNM’s graduate and professional student government in May, she already knew she wanted to do something about the website of the bursar’s office.
At a GPSA meeting Saturday morning, Poliana outlined issues with the site and reported on the progress she had made with the University administration to fix them.
Poliana said multiple problems exist on the site that made it difficult for students to understand where their fees are going.
“There are several problems as you all know, from no clear descriptions and code, no hierarchy of charges, no saturation between tuition and fees, duplicate charges, differential fees that are not explained and so on and so forth,” she said.
The GPSA will make a presentation to the Finance and Facilities Committee of the Board of Regents about the site on Friday, Poliana said.
“We are going to be explaining why we think the current model is problematic,” she said. “We are also going to make suggestions on how we think it can be improved.”
GPSA Chief of Staff Matthew Rush said his organization wants to help restructure the website so students can easily discern what fees they have and what money they get from the school.
“What we are trying to do is get the administration, the bursar’s office, to clearly delineate them, separate them out into different categories so students can clearly understand what they’re paying for tuition, what they’re paying for fees, some of the other charges that they have and also the reimbursements students are getting,” he said.
Poliana said she thinks this change will affect the entire student body at UNM.
“I think this is going to be a significant change for all students,” she said.
Outreach
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GPSA will also attempt to reach out to students by collecting submissions for a new logo.
Poliana said at the meeting that the new logo is one of several methods of reaching out to inform students about the student government.
“This is part of our outreach efforts, just so our student population can better understand who we are, what we do and how we can better serve them,” she said.
Rush said the outreach initiative includes designing a new logo for the organization to make it easier for students to recognize GPSA.
“GPSA has a couple of variations on their logo, and sometimes it’s hard, with those variations, to make sure that students know exactly what they’re referring to when they refer to GPSA,” he said. “So when we design our logo, we want to make sure we give students a quick icon so that they can easily identify things that are related to GPSA.”
Rush said because GPSA is a student organization, its design requirements are not limited by the standards of UNM. He said GPSA is working with other organizations to create the logo.
“We already are working with (University) Communications and Marketing to help design a logo that reflects the character of GPSA but also invokes the nature of what it means to be a student at UNM,” he said. “We have a small working group that is looking at some of the current logos that are out there and we will be extending our timeline for accepting designed submissions.”
The guidelines for the design of the logo can be found on GPSA’s Wordpress site, Rush said. He said the deadline for submitting designs is undetermined.
“That will probably run through October, but we don’t have a final deadline on that,” he said. “We will be sending out an advertisement soon to solicit more. We have a few submissions thus far, but we want to make sure we have quite a bit out there so we have a lot to choose from.”
