Beginning this fall, Slippery Rock University is making use of three new mobile apps that will help make life easier for students, both new and experienced.
Used at more than 250 college campuses in North America, an app called CORQ will allow Slippery Rock students to look at all of the organizations offered on campus and see the events happening that are posted from CORE.
Any recognized student organization has a portal through CORE, which acts as a profile and keeps track of its roster, events and documents. CORQ will make it much simpler for students to get in contact with said clubs.
“We really push this out to first-year students just so they can look at all the organizations that they can get involved in,” said Samantha Carmean, a graduate assistant for CORE. “That way, if they’re interested in one of them, they can click ‘join’ and it will send an email to that president or advisor letting them know that this person is interested in joining that club and learning more information about it.”
Making it harder to misplace your student ID, CORQ also generates a personal QR code for each student. This can be used as an event pass, meaning the app will be how students get scanned into campus events, showing real-time attendance.
The University Program Board is looking into using CORQ for all of their events, including travel trips and concerts. Carmean said that athletics can even make use of the app so that students don’t need to be counted as they enter the gates.
Events on campus can be filtered by different categories, including distance, perks, and themes such as arts and music and athletics.
“You could essentially eat on campus free the whole week if you’re looking for free food events,” Carmean said about the perks category.
Though mainly freshmen have been encouraged to download and use the app, Carmean said that it can definitely be of use to upperclassmen, who usually live off-campus and don’t always carry their card.
Carmean feels that the response to the app has been nothing but positive.
“I think a lot of people are loving [CORQ],” Carmean said. “It’s real-time, you don’t have to carry your card around anymore, and it’s all handheld. We’re becoming more technology-based.”
Another app, Handshake, is a new career management network that is being shared between the Office of Career Education and Development and Student Employment and Payroll. The app will feature job postings, both on- and off-campus, internships, and will also be a way to schedule appointments with the Career Education office.
Rather than the different methods of offering on-campus jobs, the system will eventually group all of them together and post them for students to easily find.
“By next fall, it will be standard practice that all on-campus jobs will be posted on Handshake,” said Renee Coyne, the Associate Director in the Office of Career Education and Development.
The system was opened in July and, one month later, had 560 job listings, some of which it didn’t have last year.
Connected with the single sign-on on the university website, students can use their SRU credentials to log into the system and create a profile. It will then ask for information such as major, GPA, and interests.
“You can say ‘not sure’, especially freshmen, if they’re not sure what they’re looking for,” Coyne said. “But if you’re a junior or senior, you might want to solidify and pay attention to those questions and answer them accurately.”
Handshake will then filter jobs to you based on things such as geographic and industry preferences.
Along with being able to chat with employers, students can also message peers in the system, whether it be fellow students at SRU or at other universities.
Coyne said, “If there was a junior at Carnegie Mellon or Pitt that worked at [the internship] you want last year, you could see their account and send them a message asking how they applied, or what department they were in, or what they liked and didn’t like about it.”
Lastly, GET is an app that allows students to easily track their meal plans. It displays how many meals one has left for the week and how much flex remains in their account. If a student runs out of flex, he or she can use a deposit option to add money back in.
The app also lets students order food from T&B Naturally, located in the Bailey Library and Quaker Steak, in the Smith Student Center. An explore option pinpoints other places to for students to eat at on Campus, such as the food truck that sits outside of North Hall.
