By Allyson Booth | Contributor
In the years since the Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation was completed, students of all schools and majors come to use the study rooms. The study rooms in Foster are phenomenal, except for one thing: They lack a system that notifies students occupying the room that their time is up and another student has booked it.
If a student wants to book a study room in Foster, all they have to do is log in to the database with their Bear I.D. It then shows a list of all the study rooms available at the time have selected. Students can select the exact room they want, but it doesn’t send a confirmation.
Last month, I went up to the business school with a friend to study. I had booked one of the study rooms on the fourth floor. Upon arriving, I noticed that it said we had the room but there was still someone in it. Trying to be a courteous person and allow the student to stay in the study room, I logged back into the system and booked another study room this time on the third floor.
When we got to the third floor, it was the same problem. Someone was already in our study room. Scared to ask someone to leave the room, we ended up walking the halls of the third and fourth floors to see what rooms were actually empty before we booked one. It became apparent that this was a problem, considering the rooms were marked as available, but in reality there were students occupying almost all of them.
This got me thinking, why doesn’t Baylor do something about this? I asked several of my friends if they had ever had this problem when trying to study at the business school and three of them said yes. Baylor should implement a system so that students would know when their time was up.
So why doesn’t Baylor come up a solution to this problem?
I think Baylor could update the system to be able to send text messages to the students when their time in the study rooms begin/end or they could even put some kind of buzzer in the room so that the student is aware their time is up in case they didn’t have their phone close by.
By implementing a system like this, Baylor would reduce the amount of times a student books a study room and arrives finding students already using the room. It would allow students to know when their time begins or ends, that way another student can use it.
I think this problem should be addressed in order to ensure that every student at Baylor is able to use the resources the university graciously provides.
Allyson Booth
Sophomore accounting major
Mena, Ark.
