Advice

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about Baruch College is the way the school communicates with us. I would suggest the school use a blog type of format with student questions and student feedback. 

For example, when students do course evaluations and Baruch puts them on the Baruch website, it only includes the numbers and no comments. However, numbers aren't all encompassing and can't tell the student everything we should consider before taking a class. Things such as, is this going to be a class with a heavy course load? Is this a class that I should ideally take with another class because the material go well together? These types of questions, and many others cannot be answered through a simple number. This means that the students have to go on sites like Rate My Professor, Reddit, Discord, or ask around for teacher recommendations. However, excluding the fact that ratings are subjective, using these sites is also untrustworthy because we can't tell if there are fake reviews or reviews made out of spite.

I propose that Baruch College make a blog like site that includes all the professors at the school and update with new professors as necessary. The way to get in would be with out Baruch computer login and the student cannot leave a review unless CUNYfirst also shows that the student has taken the class. Additionally, I would like for the site to offer a space where people can leave questions, that stay on the site permanently, for others to answer. Over time this would make for a tighter knit community with everyone helping each other and a cleaner database of all the professors. 

Similarly, I would propose, especially in the current online situation that the different offices of Baruch such as Financial Aid, Bursar, Registrar, get together and make a massive site where students can leave general questions for everyone to answer. Looking at the current Baruch website, I can see that it's leaning in this direction. They have opened "Ask Baruch" chat with a bot that bring you to a link that it thinks you currently need. In addition to the bot, if we had a site that included all the general questions, asked in a way students understand, it would cut down on the line of people waiting to speak with these offices everyday. Often times, the problem isn't about finding the content but finding which question is most similar to my question. The current website has questions that are so broad I often feel like my question is a combination of a few. Students should be able to respond to each other's questions and the different departments oversee if the answers are accurate and then only respond if the question is not answered. This would allow students to help each other out and ultimately make the community more understanding and know of the procedures of the offices more, and of course get their questions answered faster.