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Meg Decker is senior at UCSC, double majoring in Intensive Psychology
and History. She serves as one of two Good Neighbor Initiative Interns
in the Chancellors Undergraduate Internship Program (CUIP). The
goal of the Good Neighbor Initiative is to work to improve the relations
between the university and the community surrounding it. She felt
her psychology major gave her the ability to understand the importance
of validating everyone’s feelings in the sensitive town-gown
relationship. Prior to attaining her position, she worked as a Community
Assistant (a position similar to a Residential Assistant) at Kresge
College, an experience that allowed her to develop abilities to
work with varying opinions, educative skills, and practice patience
-- all of which would be pivotal in her internship. She also worked
as a Student Life and University guide which familiarized her with
the all the accomplishments the university made as well as the benefits
it provided. These points were necessary for those who felt the
university often only provided a burden to the community.
In the first portion of the internship, Meg and her co-intern, Nico
Archer, worked with the Santa Cruz police department to promote
a campaign for a safer Halloween downtown. They offered suggestions
to make the consequences of fines more known by displaying the fines
more prominently on the promotion flyers. They also made sure that
students were aware of the increased triple fine zone by distributing
the flyers all over campus. Both interns also worked with the Student
Health Outreach and Promotions (SHOP) office and the campus police
department to distribute information on the Just Say Gnome, Party
Small campaign. They went door-to-door to encourage students in
the community to party small and responsibly, if they were going
to party.
Throughout the year, Meg also attended various city meetings with
the Santa Cruz Neighbors group and George Blumenthal, the University
Chancellor, on topics ranging from safety in Santa Cruz to the annual
city budget to emergency preparedness to the university’s
Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). The internship’s year-long
project was also developed, which worked off the previously developed
Good Neighbor Guideless to develop a four star Good Neighbor Certification
Program. To be inundated at the start of next academic year, this
program hopes to reward and encourage students to maintain exemplary
judicial behavior on campus by providing them with an online training
course. Among other programs and policies, this course will provide
information about the Good Neighbor Guidelines and the Santa Cruz
Party Ordnance. After competing this training course, the participants’
CRE’s will get a email to review this student’s file,
and the student will be given a ranking contingent upon their community
involvement, judicial behavior and completion of the training course.
Participants of the program will receive a certificate which they
could present to local landlords in hopes that landlords would give
priority to these students (a website will be available explaining
the certification).
Throughout the year by working on the various projects, as well
as taking the Leadership and Institution class taught by the Dean
of Undergraduate Education, Meg was exposed to varying opinions
on how administration works or should work. She brought these lessons
back to the community which greatly helped address their concerns.
Although she graduates in June, Meg is unsure what is next. She
hopes to take some time off to travel before hopefully continuing
with either graduate school in clinical psychology or law school.
Thanks in part to the problem solving skills developed in her internship,
she feels ready for either.
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