Commuter Student Services Hosts Kickoff Event

DSAES News
July 21, 2022

August 26 - For the 2013-2014 school year, the University of Houston is transforming into a more residential campus. Beginning this fall, two new residence halls will open to accommodate the growing population of students enrolling at the university and choosing to live on campus. The University continues to expand its resources, faculty, staff, and programs to ensure that students receive high-quality education and an impactful college experience.

Although on-campus residents will be at an all-time high this year, there is still a large population of commuter students at UH. Therefore, The Dean of Students Office developed Commuter Student Services last spring, in part, to acknowledge the unique challenges that commuter students encounter with college and to help create a connection with the university. Several benchmarking and assessment tools were compiled to measure commuter student needs, engagement, and challenges. As a result, the Dean of Students Office developed Commuter Student Services.

“Our primary purpose is to ensure that the needs of commuter students are acknowledged and addressed by our campus community,” said Alison Von Bergen Wells, assistant dean of students. Commuter Student Services connects commuter students to resources on/off-campus and provides programs/events to positively impact students through their college experience.

The Commuter Awareness Kickoff is the inaugural event for this fall semester. Branston Harris, the graduate assistant for Commuter Student Services, added, “This is a festive event, targeted towards commuter students with free food, games, plenty of prizes, and a variety of valuable resources for commuter students to take advantage of on campus. We are excited about the partners that are helping to make this program a huge success.”

Partners for this event include UH Dining Services, Parking & Transportation Services, and Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC). Each partner will have a station providing a host of giveaways and resource information for commuter students.

This premier event, in association with Weeks of Welcome, is an additional way of welcoming commuter students to the UH campus. Commuter Student Services plans on making this event a recurring component each fall.