It’s Thursday which means UPUA held its weekly meeting in the HUB last night. A meeting packed with a little bit of everything saw a new representative, some inspiring legislation, and even a new look. Hell, let’s just skip right to the good stuff.

The assembly moved to add Resolution #07-11 to the agenda at the beginning of the meeting, which is “Support for a Student on The Project LionPATH Steering Committee.” At last week’s meeting, Rep. Isaac Will addressed the student outcry over LionPATH, saying that if students are complaining, UPUA should be taking action to fix it.

And action they are. The LionPATH Steering Committee is directly responsible for the implementation and execution of the new system. There is no student voice on this committee and, up until a few weeks ago, nobody in the assembly even knew it existed.

“Part of the challenge is we don’t know much about this committee or what it does,” President Terry Ford said. A few representatives from UPUA, including Rep. Samantha Geisinger who chairs the Academic Affairs Committee, met with administrators and LionPATH executives. Geisinger reported that the administrators and those who work on LionPATH are very much aware of how terrible students think LionPATH is.

The resolution, which passed unanimously, is essentially the assembly pursuing student representation on the LionPATH Steering Committee. For now, the focus is just on securing a student seat on the committee, and once that position is solidified UPUA can discuss which student should be the representative.

Just when you thought all the excitement from last night’s meeting was over, Director of Communications Logan Echard announced that UPUA is rebranding, and revealed the organizations new logo:

The new logo, which is much easier to read and much better represents UPUA on first glance, is a welcome upgrade over the old UPUA logo:

The updated version actually says “UPUA” on it and includes “Your Student Government,” so anyone who comes across it will know what it’s representing. There’s also an alternate version that says “Penn State Student Government” where “Your Student Government” is. Additionally, UPUA rolled out a new website this morning. The old site was pretty straightforward, but the upgraded one is even more so.

UPUA hopes the updates will help better represent the organizations goals and responsibilities with students as it moves into its second decade (UPUA was, as you can see above, founded in 2006).

The rest of the meeting was relatively straightforward. The meeting started with a couple of special presentations, the first of which from Jaden Rankin-Whalers, a Co-President of Lion’s Pantry, an organization which offers a no-questions-asked food pantry for Penn State students. Holley Rochfor was the other, and she explained her work with the university’s Student-Parent Childcare Subsidy Program which offers support for low-income students who have dependent children. According to Rochfor, 0.8 percent of University Park students file having dependent children, which works out to about 400.

In his presidential report, Ford touched on the plans for the Board of Trustees Town Hall, which will hopefully take place before the November Board meeting and include five hand-selected trustees…although Ford didn’t spill on which ones. A man’s gotta have his secrets, I guess.

Vice President Katie Jordan’s report was also pretty straightforward, focusing largely on this week’s Faculty Senate meeting and the smoke-free report, which Jordan thought was pretty well received by the Senate.

Other action items included the confirmation of At-Large Representative Andrew George, who seemed ready to get involved in the assembly despite joining in the middle of the term, and Resolution #06-11, “Recognition of Student Diversity Presentation to Faculty Senate.”

In discussing the legislation, Ford explained that UPUA often drafts resolutions like #06-11 to recognize various members of the Penn State community or their actions because it shows the administration that someone is taking note of the good things going on at the university.

“[The recognitions] are very much appreciated by Old Main,” he said.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:32 p.m. after a handful of comments for the good of the order.

Promotion of the Week: Chief of Staff Jen Heckman announced that UPUA is ordering apparel, which isn’t really important to any of you but @UPUA, if you’re reading this, I’ll trade you one (or like 50) Onward State laptop stickers for a UPUA laptop sticker. You know where to find me.