PROJECT NARRATIVE

Team Members: Baron Frankenstein, Alex Lee, and Stanley Wong

 

The City College of New York (CCNY) was established in 1847 and has provided a high quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. However, with gradual decrease in funding, the college’s infrastructure is deteriorating and it negatively impacts students, professors, and campus faculty mentally and physically. “The NAC always has at least one broken elevator, and immobile escalators are the norm. Marshak is under constant construction. The engineering building has a slanted floor. Shepard’s air conditioning makes it hard to hear the professors. Water drips from ceilings everywhere,” a student reports (Izzo). With most classes being held in the North Academic Building (NAC), the lack of art around the building has infamously made it one of the most depressing buildings on campus for students and professors to work in. The NAC’s brutalist designs were crafted by a prison architect for cheap costs of construction and design (Lowder). However, the building’s plain design and confusing inner layout mentally strain students and sometimes causing anxiety. With recent budget cuts and financial embezzlement scandals, CCNY has cut back on the campus maintenance staff, thus, lowering the quality of service and living conditions on the campus. As we transition from one campus president to another, there is little to no improvements to the issues at hand. Our team consists of 3 undergraduate students of CCNY, Baron Frankenstein, Alex Lee, and Stanley Wong. We are mentally and physically tired with dealing with the college’s deteriorating infrastructure, boring and dull environment, and abhorrent sanitary conditions on a daily basis. Our proposal is to help improve such conditions by outsourcing most of the jobs to CCNY students, boost student morale by reinvigorating our athletics program, and providing alternative solutions to the sanitary and living conditions on campus. We plan to run a one-to-two year trial run and, if successful, plan to keep the project running indefinitely.

To help with most infrastructure repairs, we propose to outsource most infrastructure maintenance/repair tasks and jobs to engineering students at the Grove School of Engineering. The Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering students are to be tasked on maintaining and repairing campus escalators, elevators, and general building upkeeps. The Computer Engineering and Computer Science students are tasked with upgrading the campus’s network infrastructure and maintaining network servers. The Electrical Engineering students are tasked with replacing and maintaining the college’s building wirings and lighting fixtures. The Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Chemical Engineering students are tasked with helping maintenance crews with asbestos removal throughout the campus. The jobs can be applied for through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid’s (FAFSA) work-study program or assigned as a separate class course offered exclusively to engineering students. This proposal can benefit both sides because the university gets free or cheap labor, depending on the job, and engineering students can get first-hand experience and apply the theories they learn in their classes in real-world applications. This proposed project decreases the amount of stress to engineering students in being pressured to find an internship in their field and allows more time for engineering students to focus on their work. 

Such work studies can also apply to the art majors. Art students can display murals to put up around the campus to boost  spirit for the students, as well as, building up their art portfolio.. Aesthetic is something that people subconsciously need and at City College there is a very established aesthetic theme with the gothic castles up in Harlem. The NAC is an eyesore in this beautiful conglomeration of castles. If it has to be different there might as well be a stark difference and a new paint job is a safe better to change over spirits. These student murals will have a projected budget of ten thousand dollars. The students will be assigned as painters, to experience what it is to be compensated for a job of this scale. Students will learn how to make invoices and treat this program as real time structured experience in the freelance lifestyle. 

Like the engineering students, artists needs to have a solid base of experience and acclaim before they can start making actual money or being taken seriously in the market. These established past history and previous salary for work. When looking for new jobs the importance of previous pay stubs helps define your worth. The 1.5 million dollar donation is for the radical salaries taking in 50 students for the first 4 years of the project. Each student will be required to work 100 hours at $15 per hour. This provides each of these students with $1,500 of extra work a semester doing something in their field and preparing them for the future. The cost is projected around $75k a year.

Moving on from the arts to the general student body. Students love to have something to rally behind. As a school we should be proud of your sports teams as they are the basis for creating community among students. Right now, most students treat this as a commuter school, showing up for classes and promptly leaving after their need to be here has expired. To change the moral we need to change Benny the beaver. When I institute this idea I also issue this belief. Why be the prey when you can be the predator. That is why our new mascot is THE TRAPPER, in reference to 19th century fur trappers. The metaphor is that we killed the beaver and graduated to the trapper. The double entendre of trapper also creates a lill laugh when you realize that teams will have to travel to Harlem to face the trappers, Mascot who will be a Huge Fur trader draped in the finest beaver pelts. 

It is also important to maintain a suitable environment for student residents. Students who live on campus would be in CCNY Towers, the only place for dorming. Such factors like cleanliness and infrastructure are to be considered as it can affect the student’s mood. Having to be welcomed home after a long day outside is what everyone wants, CCNY Towers should not disappoint those who return to their room. However, a wider problem that needs to be addressed is the lack of security when it comes to identifying a student from a stranger. The campus itself is in potential crisis as our gates are open to whoever decides to stroll in. As this college is located in the middle of the city, there is no telling what person can get inside with unknown intentions. With more man power in guards and proper training, it will make CCNY’s grounds much safer to be within. Recently, last year, a student attending A. Philip Randolph Campus Highschool, brought in a gun within our campus (Johnson). Although it was fake, what would the intention be if an adult was the carrier. We cannot suspect anyone since our university is attended by various people in ethnicity and age. The only way to successfully identify someone is by examining our student identification cards.

We plan to measure the outcomes by conducting surveys systematically. We will conduct one survey before the project begins about how CCNY students feel about the current state of the institution (on a 1-5 rating scale). We will conduct a series of surveys semi-annually or annually, post-project, on student’s update on their opinions of the current state and of the programs we proposed (on a 1-5 rating scale).

 

REFERENCES:

1. “Data from Caution Ahead.” Center for an Urban Future (CUF), NYC Center for an Urban Future, Mar. 2014, https://nycfuture.org/data/data-from-caution-ahead.
2. Chen, David W. “Dreams Stall as CUNY, New York City’s Engine of Mobility, Sputters.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 29 May 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/nyregion/dreams-stall-as-cuny-citys-engine-of-mobility-sputters.html.
3. Izzo, Nate. “City College’s Disrepair Becomes Dangerous.” Ccnycampus.org, TheCampus, 10 Feb. 2019, http://www.ccnycampus.org/2018/10/city-colleges-disrepair-becomes-dangerous/.
4. Johnson, Nicole. “Student Brings Toy Gun to Manhattan High School, Prompting Multi-Campus Lockdown: Sources.” WPIX 11 New York, 18 Oct. 2018, https://pix11.com/2018/10/18/person-detained-at-manhattan-high-school-city-college-on-lockdown-officials/.
5. Lowder, J. Bryan. “Were Brutalist Buildings on College Campuses Really Designed to Thwart Student Riots?” Slate Magazine, Slate, 18 Oct. 2013, https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/campus-brutalism-were-the-buildings-designed-to-thwart-student-riots.html.
6. Wei, Tim. “Filtered Hydration Stations: Improving Water Access at CCNY.” Tim Wei’s Portfolio, CUNY Academic Commons, May 2019, https://timwei.commons.gc.cuny.edu/filtered-hydration-stations-improving-water-access-at-ccny/.