When running for office last spring, Paul Moinester and Co. pledged to make Student Union’s endeavors more noticeable to the student body as a whole. While the school year is still young, the Moinester administration has thus far pulled off the increasingly rare trick of keeping their campaign promise.

This semester, there have been a spat of noticeable improvements to daily life for students, many of them attributable to SU exec administrations present and past. One of these is the campus card program. A plan that has been in the works since at least February 2005, when the initial SU resolution supporting an expansion of uses of the campus card was passed, students have been able to use their University ID card at laundry machines and vending machines for the first time this semester. And even if many students would rather not have to pay for printing, it sure will be easier to be able to use the ID card to swipe to pay instead of needing to carry around extra change.

Another relatively minor but helpful addition to campus is the WULife website. Launched on Sept. 2 by the Office of Student Activities, Campus Life and SU, WULife bills itself as, “Your one-stop shop for everything WU.”

The website has links to e-mail, the Washington University directory, WebSTAC, menus at campus eateries, the Spark! calendar and the weather report, as well as University websites and links to CNN.com and Facebook, among others. It also features Student Life headlines, upcoming events and the KWUR stream. It is an incredibly convenient portal for students to get whatever University information they may desire, and by allowing students to remember one URL instead of multiple URLs, it just makes life that much easier for people who might want to look up a professor’s e-mail address or see what’s at Center Court that night.

A third initiative with SU involvement that’s improving life for students is Ruckus. In the past, this section has criticized SU for being so slow in implementing the music and movie downloading service. The initial decision to contract such a service was made in February of 2005, but Ruckus was not available to students until this past summer. Regardless, the decision to use Ruckus has been a good one by ResTech and the old Ader administration. While Ruckus music can’t go on iPods, and the selection isn’t the greatest, it is serviceable and most important, it is free.

These changes aren’t going to make the University become number one in any ranking, but they are examples of how SU can make things better in the University. With freshman elections coming up, we encourage freshmen to get involved and try to similarly help their class like SU has for the student body as a whole. We also hope that the current SU will continue on this good work.

Perhaps if Moinester can get the new Facebook changed, he could get his name on the new Law and Social Sciences Building-or at least brag about it on WULife.

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