Surrounded by various community leaders and Boston University officials, Jessica Crooker seems out of place. She is the lone student in one of the most powerful groups at BU.
The BU Task Force is responsible for voting on projects that will change the face of BU’s campus and academics, and Crooker is absorbing all the information given to her, preparing to soon cast a critical vote about the future of the campus.
Though she is a commuter student who admits she has less of an idea of what campus life is like than an on-campus resident, Crooker said she is prepared to represent the opinion of the students and how they feel about BU’s interaction with the community.
‘As a commuter student, I have less opportunity to get involved,’ said Crooker, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. ‘It’s harder to manage my time.’
But because the Task Force is a community-based organization, a member of the Local Students Union is preferable, according to Associate Dean of Students, Herbert Ross.
‘Many members [of the Task Force] are from Allston-Brighton area,’ Ross said.
Because many students live in the Allston-Brighton area, it was thought that a member of the Local Students Union should be chosen ‘to offer the student opinion as best as he or she can in order to provide a dialogue,’ according to Ross, who assisted in selecting Crooker.
Despite the three hours she spends each day commuting from her home in Duxbury, the eight hours a day she spends in classes and at her job in the Orientation Office on campus and her time spent as Vice President of Programming for the Local Students Union, Crooker said she finds time to gauge the student opinion.
‘I usually try to get a mixture of people who live on and off campus,’ Crooker said.
Among the top concerns she brings to the group of community officials is a desire to accurately represent students and disprove negative stereotypes community members have regarding BU students in the surrounding communities.
‘I think a lot of times some of them usually just talk about the negative aspects of students,’ Crooker said. ‘They talk about that too much. They never stop to think about the positive aspects BU students bring.’
Robert Canterbury, a Task Force member from the Audubon Neighborhood Association, said that although Crooker ‘hasn’t said much at the task force meetings,’ he agrees with her sentiments about increasing a dialogue between students and neighbors.
‘I think there are too many barriers between students and neighbors,’ Canterbury said.
Despite a significant age difference between Crooker and her Task Force peers, Crooker said the structure of the meetings allows her to voice her opinions about the future of BU.
‘I think what people usually do is that they have open ears and they’ll let you get your message out. There’s a lot of positive reinforcement,’ Crooker said.
‘The [task force] always wants to hear the student opinion. They want to know, what do students think about the new buildings about future of the school?’
As a biology major, Crooker said she has especially strong feelings about the proposed Life Science building, which will be voted on by Task Force members at the next meeting.
‘I’ve seen what the labs look like now and the pictures of what the labs could be,’ Crooker said. ‘With the new building, there will be so many more opportunities for research and the future of the school.’
As for her future on the Task Force, Crooker said she has not spoken with members at the Community Affairs Office at BU as to how long she will remain a member, but she hopes to continue serving as a student representative.
‘We haven’t really talked about long-range planning,’ Crooker said. ‘But it’s a nice opportunity.’
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