(image credit: Madyson Alexander)

SNHU cares, but only when it gets called.

It was move in day. I was one of the first residents to move into the brand-new Kingston Hall. I was excited to start college and my quest to a highly transferrable Bachelor’s Degree. Not to mention, I was super excited to move into Kingston Hall.

I was anticipating to move into a modern, state-of-the-art air-conditioned room, but what I walked into, however, was a sauna.

At first, I thought that the high temperature must have been a system default, so I lowered the manual temperature and continued with my day. When I returned a few hours later, the temperature remained stagnate at its scorching temperature it started at.

My room remained uncomfortably hot for weeks to come. Even when the outside temperature dropped into the 40s and 50s, my room temperature remained in the upper 70s and low 80s. This is when I realized something was wrong.

At this point, I reached out to my RA who opened a ticket for my room. However, not a single person came by my room or reach out to me in any way regarding the heating problem. This process repeated several times. I only got one visit, and that one visit resulted in a claim stating my computer was the cause of the temperature disparity. That was probably one of the most uneducated things that I ever heard.

It got to the point where I was flat out disappointed with SNHU’s lack of action on my request. This week, I took to social media to call SNHU out. I posted publicly on my Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts expressing my disappointment with the university for improperly handling my situation.

Within an hour, I got a response on almost every social media account from SNHU and facilities was at my door the next day. If it hadn’t been for social media, the heating problem in my room never would have been fixed. In order to see progress, I needed to publicly shame SNHU.

This, however, wasn’t the first I had to publicly shame SNHU to get something fixed.

Many students probably remember the glorious period at the beginning of the year when laundry in Kingston Hall was free. This only lasted for a short time, though. We knew that the only reason why laundry in Kingston was free was because the system that handled the payment processing from our Penmen Cash accounts was not fully implemented.

I have no problem with implementing a payment system for laundry. In fact, I was expecting it. However, I didn’t expect the laundry machines to be unusable when the system was implemented. So, I did the same thing I did to resolve my heating problem: took to social media to express my disappointment of the university. Within two hours, the laundry system was fixed.

For students like myself who are living on campus, SNHU is like our landlord. When you buy or rent an apartment, the landlord is responsible for the maintenance. So, if your AC goes out or your laundry machine is broken, the landlord is responsible for fixing it, or calling someone else to fix it.

Furthermore, it is expected I should only need to ask once to get problems like these fixed. I shouldn’t’t have to ask three times: once should suffice. Once SNHU facilities gets paged, it’s their responsibly to fix it as soon as possible.

I am a tenant at SNHU and I expect SNHU as my landlord to take action when I reach out about a problem. It is unacceptable for a landlord to ignore a tenant’s repair request. SNHU only takes responsibility when it is called out publicly on social media.

The behavior exhibited by SNHU with resolving student’s issues has been completely unacceptable, and it’s about time for these practices to change.

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