Center necessary for connecting students, administration

Editor,

I am in my fourth year at UNM, and over the years I have become all too familiar with the unbearably long lines (that at least I could avoid by taking a number, going to class and then coming back to Financial Aid only to wait another half hour before service), the miscommunication that often ensues between myself, the Financial Aid Office, the Scholarship Office and Cashier Department, and, finally, with the boisterous bureaucratic bumblings of misinformed, ill-mannered and unfriendly higher-ups at Student Services. Yet I take comfort in the fact that I can stop and check with my Financial Aid officer between classes, ask a question at the Registrar's during my lunch hour or voice some new financial panic to the Bursar's Office as soon as it arises.

I foresee myself being at UNM for at least another two semesters, and it is almost certain that I will need to voice some new and ridiculous issues to an actual human being rather than someone over live chat who has no idea who I am and doesn't care to know who I am, or to some impersonal automated system that never fully answers my questions on FastInfo. It seems an extreme disservice to the entire student body to take away the small amount of human contact between students and administration. Nothing is achieved by giving us one more reason to detest the cold, impersonal bureaucracy of UNM.

I therefore implore the administration of this institution to call to mind the needs of its students and seek an alternative to moving one of the only points of contact between a rapidly growing student population and a very large, and obviously understaffed, administration. I feel that through this letter, I am not merely voicing my own opinion on this matter but those of my fellow students and also the opinions of the staff of the Student Services Center who have to deal with the lines, the complaints, the misunderstandings and the crises that occur not just every single semester but every single day, just like we, the students, do. Serve your students wisely, and let us keep our Student Services Center building on Main Campus where it can maintain the fundamental purpose of service to the students.

Megan M. Willoughby

UNM student