Lot 4 | Photo by Grace Ramsdell | Edited by Kayli Thompson | The Wright State Guardian
The new Commuter Senator, Sabrina D’Alesandro, has brought back the Commuter Student Association (CSA) which aims to make commuter students feel more connected to campus.
The need for a CSA
D’Alesandro feels that a CSA will help commuter students have a voice at Wright State Universty (WSU) and help them feel included in the campus community.
“The biggest problem is mostly the communication with the administration and sometimes feeling like a second thought. I think one good example is Wright State did give all the commuter students masks, but I know a lot of commuter students didn’t receive them until well into the semester,” said D’Alesandro.
D’Alesandro says that she lives in Fairborn and still waited weeks for her mask to arrive so she can’t imagine how long it took students who live further from campus to get theirs. Although this is just one example of commuter students feeling like an afterthought at WSU, issues like this appear every year with another prime example being the parking dilemma that students faced in the past.
CSA Vice President Anna Spiros says that she wants to help commuter students feel connected to campus.
“After being a commuter myself, I really just want to make sure that other commuters feel like they have a place in the school community even if they aren’t on campus all the time,” said Spiros.
Goals for the CSA
“One thing that I want to do is just provide a community for students. I think having a place for commuters to go where they have a similar interest and a lot of similar struggles is important. Besides that, I want to have a place for the Commuter Senator to be able to get in direct contact with those students. Being an engineering student I can speak on behalf of engineering students, but I don’t always know what it’s like being an English student, or a business student, or a music student, or an art student, so I think that that is really important,” said D’Alesandro.
D’Alesandro wants to make sure that every student has a voice on campus, even those who don’t live on campus. A main goal for D’Alesandro is to open communication up between the university and commuter students as well as between commuter students themselves to talk about the issues that they face and ways to fix them.
“As treasurer of the CSA, it is my goal to address the commuters’ needs and use our funds in a way that would benefit the school as a whole. I would like to focus on expanding events that would cater to off-campus students to make them feel more connected despite the distance,” said Alexis Lemieux, CSA Treasurer.
While the CSA is just beginning again after a hiatus, D’Alesandro, Spiros and Lemieux all have big plans for commuter students in the future.
