News In Brief
By Katie Hughes | Apr 11 2012
Student Card printing machine secured for examsA student card printing machine will be available at the RDS for the Semester Two exams. Students who forget their student card will be able to have a new one printed on the spot for thirty euro, rather than paying the customary fifty euro fine. The University’s Budgeting Committee introduced the fine last year.According to UCD Students’ Union Education Officer Sam Geoghegan, the system was not in place for Semester One exams due to technical issues. “I think that if that was in place in Semester One, it would have saved students between 4,000 and 5,000 euro - we kind of calculated it. It’s a lot of money at stake and especially with how the economy is at the moment, every little helps.”Geoghegan has ordered “the regular amount” of pens, pencils and highlighters for distribution to students at the upcoming exams. He approximated that “a couple of thousand” pens and pencils were ordered and “a couple of hundred highlighters”, although he admits the figures are “very rough estimates”.The pens are expected to be blue, “they’re the exact same pens that we’ve ordered before with the Students’ Union logo on it and stuff.”Sexual Health App to Launch at UCDA sexual health app for smartphones is expected to be launched in UCD in the next two or three weeks. According to Students’ Union Welfare Officer Rachel Breslin, the app provides “all sorts of information with no gender specifics.”“At congress, we passed a motion about creating a sexual health website. There are a lot of different websites with sexual health information but I found that the content that Dr Siobhan O’Higgins was describing to me in this app was very, very relevant to students and it was very broad.”She explained that students would be able to access the app wherever they went, “the app idea is that a lot of students are getting smartphones so it’s something that is easy for them to access and once it’s there they can check it as often as they want and it’ll be in their head. It’s just a different way of promoting the sexual health message and its something that’s year-round; once they have it they have it forever and we can promote it as often as [we need to].”The app is being provided by AIDS West.CPR training to be made available to studentsCPR training is expected to be available to students within the next two weeks.Students’ Union Welfare Officer, Rachel Breslin stated that “following recent events in the media of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, we wanted to have it soon as it highlighted the need that anything can happen.”The training will be provided free of charge by volunteers, “There are so many people that are willing to do it now, people that would do it for free that I’m just trying to nail down a date with them.”The opportunity will be available to all students, “I’ll be trying to get as many class reps involved, and the Welfare Crew of course, because class reps are so spread out over all the faculties, but anyone that wants to can do it. We’ll try to get as many as we can, depending on the amount of free volunteers that will do the training.”Breslin explains that she would eventually like to branch out into First Aid training for students, “You could be the person that’s called upon and particularly with the situation with the services desks, I think that there’s a need to equip more students with First Aid because those staff members aren’t around … We did look into it and it’s quite costly, but it’s something that we need to prioritise now that the services desks are gone.”