By Rosemary Peters
Two or three days a week, sophomore Adam Ard hunkers down in the hall receptionist's desk in Shipstad for hours at a time and proceeds to act as the first line of dorm safety defense.
With the job of being a hall receptionist comes the responsibility of checking people into the dorm and learning to recognize every person who lives in his dorm.
On Jan. 20, UP executed a new system of color-coded stickers to improve safety around campus and to make the hall receptionists' jobs more efficient.
The goal of the new safety measure is to make it easier to identify UP students.
"The greatest benefit of the dorm specific stickers on ID cards is that it allows hall receptionists to easily identify students who do not live in their dorm," sophomore Adam Ard said. "This ensures that students cannot sneak into dorms where they do not live. From the perspective of a hall receptionist, there are no draw-backs that come to mind."
Under this new system, every dorm was assigned a different colored sticker in order to quickly differentiate each resident's hall. The students who live on campus were required to pick up their sticker and attach it to their school ID.
According to Teige Weidner from the Community Development Committee, these new stickers meet the committee's mission of "analyzing and developing efficient procedures, common practices and sound policies that will continually improve the communal aspects of residence life and facilitate the education of the whole heart and mind."
"We look to identify problems and solve them quickly and efficiently," Weidner said. "We felt that if the hall receptionists both matched the face on the card to the card holder as well as the sticker to identify the hall, they could quickly identify the person as a resident. This idea was originated from the hall receptionists. They asked for us to consider adding stickers to the cards to help improve security and to help them identify students more easily."
Weidner is not the only UP staffer who feels that the stickers are a good way to identify students' residence halls and improve UP's security.
"We've been trying over the past two years to beef up security," said Jon Merchant, Residence Life assistant director. Merchant has also been working on the creation of the stickers. "That's hard when people would just flash ID cards while pretending like they live in a dorm when they actually don't. It raises questions of who lives where."
According to front desk workers like Ard, simply having students pretend they live in the dorm they are visiting causes a lot of confusion and extra work for hall receptionists. It also causes cracks in the system and puts the safety of the students living in dorms at risk.
"The whole idea of the stickers stemmed out of many years of trying to make the campus as safe as possible," said Jedd Chang, University Village Hall Director. "Of course when we were discussing the measure, past issues such as the unfortunate murder in Mehling were brought up. However, the main thing we discussed was how to create a more safe and accurate process."
The reactions to the stickers among the student body have been diverse. On one hand, some students dislike the idea of having the stickers.
"I think it is somewhat childish and I really don't see the safety provided by the stickers," freshman Hayley Brands said. "A sticker does not stop someone from sneaking in a side door or spending the night in a dorm where they don't belong."
On the other hand, other students firmly support the sticker initiative.
"I like how the stickers differentiate students and give us our own identity," freshman Kate Huber said. "I see only added benefits from these stickers. It's not like having the sticker on my card hurts me in any way. And if it stops a creep from entering my dorm and doing something awful, I am okay with that."
Finally, some students don't really care one way or the other about the stickers.
"If it helps, I'll be happy, but if it doesn't then I don't see how campus will be any different," freshman Rachel Femling said. "I just hate how huge the stickers are. They take up half the name tag."
