It is with great pride that I welcome you to the University of Bridgeport (UB) and our residence hall system. A great many changes have been made in the last three months since we ended the Spring 2006 semester, and I’d like to highlight them for you.Three New Residence Directors
To provide better services to our resident, student population, we’ve hired three wonderful, new, professional, full-time residence hall directors to our Residence Life team. Each of them comes with a great deal of experience, enthusiasm, and commitment to making your educational experience here at UB a vibrant one. Laura Pruyne, DeVita Thurmond, and Chermele Gordon have been assigned to Barnum, Bodine, and Seeley Halls respectively. Please make some time to introduce yourself to them. They live on the first floor apartment in each of hall.
New MicroFridges
New, more efficient, and quieter MicroFridges were installed in every room on campus this summer. These are much more efficient than the ones we previously had and much quieter. I hope you’ll enjoy using them.
New washing machines and dryers
During the summer, we exchanged all our former washing machines and dryers for state of the art, highly efficient, front loading washers and dryers. In addition to being absolutely, brand new, these washing machines are going to save close to 1,000,000 gallons of water per year. The washing machines use less water and therefore expel less water. This will also help prevent flooding problems in all the halls. Both the washers and the dryers use less electricity per load as well, and in a few weeks, will be hooked up to the Internet, so every resident will be able to go on-line, look up the machines in each hall, and see from the website, which machines are in use and when each will be done. New this year is also a limit, set by the university and the student body representatives, of sixty-four cycles per semester. Each resident will receive a new laundry card, with a serial number on the back of the card. This card is assigned to only one resident per semester and will be given to you at check-in. Instead of our former system, the new cards will allow each resident to wash and dry thirty two loads of laundry per semester, or thirty two wash cycles and thirty two dry cycles or any combination of the two (forty wash
cycles and twenty-four dry cycles, etc.). This is part of the program to help students wash their clothes more effectively and in a more environmentally friendly way. Students who run out of cycles may purchase them at $1.00 a cycle from the vending machine in the lobby of Bodine Hall.
New study chairs and tables for each study lounge in each hall
In some of our halls, furniture in the study lounges was limited, but within two weeks, each study lounge in each hall will be receiving approximately three long tables and twenty chairs per lounge. We hope this will make studying in the halls with your friends and fellow community members much more fun, academically focused, and productive.
Wireless Internet (WIFI) and Internet Upgrades
What would all this new study lounge furniture mean if we didn’t also provide wireless connectivity in each of the study lounges of each hall? Yes, in addition to a $130,000 upgrade of the Internet system in both Bodine and Warner Halls, we’ve also added WIFI to each of the study lounges in each of the residence halls to help students academically and socially. The Bodine/Warner upgrades should be on-line by 4:30 p.m. on August 23, 2006, and the WIFI
network should be on-line by September 13, 2006.
New turnstiles in Bodine Hall
And yes, after much debate, we’ve installed a turnstile entry system in Bodine Hall as a pilot project for the other residence halls. After visiting and evaluating security systems at several other universities including: Drexel, UPenn, NYU, and PACE; we’ve installed a turnstile system of entry into Bodine Hall that we know will keep students safer and provide easy and quick entry into Bodine for our residents and their guests.
New chairs, bed frames, desks, and mattresses for Warner Hall
We’ve also replaced all the chairs, bed frames, desks, and mattresses in Warner Hall with 220 brand new ones. The bed frames are a nice, modern, hardwood type that allows residents flexibility in the arrangement for their rooms. The mattresses are a new, deep blue, which we hope students find more comfortable, and the new desks are designed for use with laptops and computer-based studying.
We hope all these changes exemplify our theme for this year – A New Start, New Era, and
New Traditions! Please stop in and let me know what you think of all our wonderful changes.