College junior and Undergraduate Assembly member Rico Moorer was shell-shocked when he arrived, before 10:30 p.m., at a UA meeting that was already ending.
Still, in less than an hour and a half, UA members had unanimously passed three resolutions at their meeting Sunday.
The PennCard PIN resolution, authored by UA associate member, former Daily Pennsylvanian columnist and reporter and College junior Colin Kavanaugh, was written in response to a study regarding social security numbers.
The study showed that it is possible to guess many of the nine digits of someone’s SSN just by knowing the last four. Kavanaugh viewed the use of this number to sign into buildings on campus as a security risk.
Currently, students can alter their PIN through the Division of Public Safety web site, but Kavanaugh said most students are not aware of this.
The resolution urges the adoption of a new system that would assign all new students, beginning with the class of 2014, a random nine-digit number, drawing the PIN from the last four digits of this number.
Students would also be alerted, prior to coming to Penn, of a way — Kavanaugh suggested through Penn InTouch — to change the PIN to a number they can remember better.
The resolution also urges the University to increase awareness of options that students currently have to change their PIN.
The next resolution was about housing for Penn’s Medical Emergency Response Team.
Currently, the group, a student-run, volunteer organization, is housed in Sansom Place East. College junior and MERT Operations Chief Josh Lipman said this location slows their response time, owing to the current bike-storage system, as well as being far away from the majority of incidents.
The proposal calls upon the University to search for a more suitable location for the group’s headquarters.
The final proposal was a letter to faculty members regarding the cost of textbooks. The letter cited a UA survey from last spring, in which 73 percent of respondents said textbook prices at the Penn Bookstore were unsatisfactory.
The letter also asked faculty members to consider methods which would make materials more affordable to students when choosing texts for next semester.
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