In the Fall 2023 semester, Registered Student Organizations transitioned from the old MyCentral club activities system to the new Central Connect. This newer system hosts a variety of features meant to make clubs easier to track for administration and students. Many believe, while this goal has been achieved on some level, some student leaders have had difficulty transitioning to the new system.
Central Connect is a website, at ucmo.presence.io, where students can see information about clubs on campus. Students can see different events and their descriptions as well as information about clubs. Club officers are in charge of setting up the information in the portal. Central Connect can post events, is set up in a user-friendly manner, and does not require the input of student numbers to add members. However, some have found the transition process between the old system and the new system has been a challenging one.
“In theory, everything they have going is really good, but the execution and the communication is lacking,” Addisen Miller, President of the Anime Club, said.
Miller has been a club president for the entirety of the transition process, and while she does appreciate the features of Central Connect, most notably the fact that she can place the Anime Club’s schedule on it for easy access, there have been some difficulties. Some of these difficulties include getting her club officers permissions on the website along with the inability to schedule events for the next semester over the summer. While these issues do not downplay features of the website, Miller is one of the many presidents who had difficulty with the transition period.
Another one of the difficulties of the transition process for club presidents is that it started in the middle of the Spring 2023 semester when many officer positions were changing.
“I learned pretty much everything I know [about Central Connect] from my TA,” President of the Baptist Student Union, John Hamburg said. Hamburg had recently taken the position in the Fall semester 2023 and had not received any emails about the transition.
While Hamburg does enjoy the user-friendly features of Central Connect and what it can do, Hamburg is unsure about the usefulness of Central Connect right now. “It’s interesting to see what it could be but there’s not enough awareness about it to look at it fully,” Hamburg said. The sentiment is shared by Zacher Wesley, the President of the newly instated Shakespeare Society.
“It [Central Connect] has the potential to be very useful, if more people knew about it,” Wesley said. As the president of a new club, Wesley never had any interaction with the old MyCentral system and filled out a transition form over the summer. While there was a slight difficulty with logging in once, Wesley’s transition process went over fairly smoothly, and he described Central Connect as “easy to use but hard to find,” for students.
Student Activity Representative Makoto Narita shared the technical issues he experienced with the transition process. “There was some failure of [the Central Connect] transition overall due to the information for presidents not being updated and [a] delay in transition, as the [transition] forms had to be manually reviewed and edited, including the removal of some presidents or members,” Narita said.
Narita said that there has not been a lot of information spread about the website at the time of press. Student Activities wanted to teach all organization leaders about event creation before advertising Central Connect so that organizations that had yet to get fully settled wouldn’t be left out. However, Student Activities has plans for the website going forward in terms of both making information more visible to prospective students, and making small quality-of-life changes to the site.
Narita also explained that all active organizations have transitioned over by this point and the remainder had not had any contact with Student Activities when using the old MyCentral system. However, there has been positive feedback from students about the changes. “There has been positive feedback from the realization of the website and that’s great,” Narita said.
