On November 12 I attended the Mediating Conflict and resolving disputes at Baruch workshop. During this workshop we were taught the steps to go about fixing a problem that we have at Baruch. We were told how the school has a mediating department, and the representative we had in the room talking to us about conflicts in Baruch was actually the head of that department. We started off by defining problems that we have in Baruch. Some of the ideas we brought forth had to do with the elevator problem, where people enter from the exit side rather than the enter side, and how that frustrates many people. We also talked about the offices in Baruch, such as the orientation office and how they lose our paperwork sometimes and how that frustrates us.
What we were told was how to go about dealing with that situation, and in fact, our major accomplishment from the workshop was that we had chosen a representative to go to the Student Affairs Office and talk to somebody about the freshman workshops. We were told to make our voice heard and tell the office that they should abolish this program. We made a list of complaints such as, they arent organized efficiently, people who register don’t always get into the workshop when it is full because people that didn’t register go there before them, nobody wants to go to them to start with, and the schedule is flawed because some workshops, such as the academic enrichment workshops ended at the start of the school year, so for those people that couldn’t make one of those workshops were out of luck and they would have to repeat the course next semester. This was overall, a good workshop because I found out how to go about dealing with problems in Baruch, when apparently, there are a lot of them, as we pointed out durin the workshop.