Over the past year, students in two management courses have provided consultation for an unusual client, free of charge: Associated Student Government.
ASG used advice from last winter’s Industrial Engineering Systems Project Management Class and a course on advertising and brand management in considering new ways to make itself more relevant to students and lobby the administration on long-anticipated projects.
Weinberg junior Chloe Arthurs took the brand management course in the fall and examined ASG’s brand. Her group interviewed former ASG President Jonathan Webber and surveyed students. The survey found that while people know that ASG exists, they don’t know its structure or function, she said.
The group suggested changes such as renaming ASG to Advocates for Student Interests and Services for Tomorrow and placing the ASG logo online next to projects it helps sponsor, according to Arthurs.
“Our advice focused a lot on having ASG tell (the students) what they do more,” Arthurs said. “There are a lot of services that ASG provides Northwestern that the students don’t know that ASG is behind the screen.”
Although ASG President Neal Sales-Griffin – who was a teaching assistant in the advertising class last fall – said he disagrees with the suggestion to remove “government” from ASG’s name, he found many of the group’s conclusions accurate.
“Their analysis highlighted a lot of issues facing the organization,” the SESP junior said.
The management course developed a “pretty extensive” proposal for Wi-Fi in dorms based on the work of a group in a prior related course, said McCormick senior Anna Xu, a former ASG academic vice president.
Once the subject was chosen, Xu said she and others began talking to ASG.
“When we delved into the project even further, we started having more discussions with the administration,” Xu said. “Obviously, I helped facilitate the connection with ASG, and we attacked the project together from different fronts.”
The management project class Xu took found Wi-Fi in campus residences would be a worthwhile investment, which helped support ASG’s ultimately successful request to the administration for wireless Internet.
In the past, the administration has implemented some suggested projects students in the course have developed – the WildCARD was originally proposed by students in the class.
“The administration is used to hearing a lot of good ideas come out of this class,” Xu said. “I think it had a lot of impact on the university’s final decision because we were able to quantify a lot of things that ASG was saying.”
ASG was considering working with more courses, including McCormick’s freshman year Engineering Design and Communication course, to expand ASG’s abilities on campus, Sales-Griffin said.
“We’re going to try and get more great ideas, leveraging the fact that we have all these brilliant students at this school,” he said. “The potential for students to develop the organization is tremendous if they are involved.”
