New Associate Vice President of Auxiliary Services Pam Peterson and Interim Executive Director of Dining Services Steve Griffin discussed updates in dining services, USG open positions were talked about and USG President Adam Revoir emphasized face mask wearing at the Undergraduate Student Government general council meeting over Zoom on Thursday, Feb. 3.

Guest speakers: Pam Peterson and Steve Griffin

Peterson talked about her new role in dining services and dining services’ desire to please students this semester and next fall.

“We’re at a point where we need to put COVID behind us and get back to great customer service, great food and more options for our students once again,” Peterson said.

With new employees, dining services was able to expand its options by reopening stations and expanding brunch hours for student access from 10 a.m. to 9 a.m.

“We reopened all of the stations and they will stay open through the spring semester,” Peterson said. “That’s our hope.”

Griffin hopes to keep “ahead of the curve” for technological advances in the dining industry for future semesters.

“One thing we’re looking at doing is more kiosk ordering,” Griffin said.”We will have kiosks in ASC and other places out there that you would be able to place an order through the kiosk.”

With the technological changes, Griffin hopes mobile ordering will become a possibility for Scooter’s as well.

“One thing the pandemic has given us all is new experiences on how we interact with different retail places,” Griffin said.

Special election updates

Vice President of Academic Affairs Rosie Salem discussed the open positions in USG and the upcoming elections for these positions.

The positions up for election include vice president of equity and inclusion, senior class senator, commuter senator, first-year residential senator and intercultural affairs representative.

“By the retreat, we should have these positions filled in, hopefully—definitely for the executive position and most likely the commuter senator—but we were having a hard time filling in the other three last semester,” Salem said.

Mask wearing

President Adam Revoir reminded USG about the importance of masking up and leading by example as a student government.

“Make sure that if we want to stay on campus and continue these in-person activities to make sure to endorse and approve masks,” Revoir said.

The eboard for USG is coming up with creative ways to endorse wearing face coverings and to promote it to students.

“We said ‘don’t make it a task, wear a mask,’” Revoir said. “But really just try to lead by example and make sure we can recommend folks to wear masks.”

No finance update was given at this meeting.

Natalie Hoepner can be reached at hoep8497@stthomas.edu.