The Daily Free Press’ stance on the Community Service Center’s Alternative Spring Breaks (“For some, a worthwhile break “alternative,'” Wednesday, p.1; “Making service cool,” Wednesday, p. 6) was extremely narrow-minded and written to make it look like there is nothing wrong with the application process. I cannot even count on two hands how many people, like myself, followed the CSC’s instructions to register online and still were not able to get a spot. This was simply because of the overload on the web server.
There is a clear demand for the program and I do not think that ASB took the fact that people would wait for 24 hours straight during old registration into account when they created their online registration system. If anything, it would have been fairer to keep the previous system because it would have brought out the people who actually wanted to go and not those people who can simply wake up early.
With its promotion, the CSC clearly produced more demand for the program than it had supply. I would figure that the CSC, of all places, should err more on the optimistic side of things and expand the ASB program to more than 317 people for a total undergraduate enrollment of 18,534. That’s saying that not even two percent of the undergraduate population can participate.
Like I said before, I would not expect the entire university to be interested, but even if you figure half of that undergrad population (9,267 students) were &- that would still result in only 3.4 percent able to participate.
Acknowledging that BU cannot expand the program immediately, I still believe that a better online registration system could have been established. When some people I know signed on exactly at 8:00 a.m. did not receive spots and those who signed on at 8:03 a.m. did, I think there’s a problem there.
My overarching point here is that when there are a ton of people who want to help out, the organization responsible should make it easy to help out &- not create a flawed online registration and possibly anger potential volunteers who will have a bad taste in their mouths about volunteering for the rest of their life just because of that one bad experience. It might have already happened.
Michael DeFilippis
COM 2013
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