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Message from Gage E. Paine,

Vice President for Student Affairs

Can you tell?  The fall semester has started!  And it is a roaring start!  From the more than 2,000 folks at Late Night at the Rec to the ravenous hordes (and that was just the staff) at the President's Picnic at the Sombrilla, students, faculty and staff have enjoyed RoadRunner Days!  We had a standing room only crowd at the opening Convocation and packed stands at volleyball and soccer matches.  It's clear that the students are embracing campus life at UTSA.

And it doesn't end there.  When you walk across campus even in the late afternoon, the place is humming.  I hope everyone can find a moment to be out on campus to experience the positive energy.  Don't sit at your desk during lunch.  Try a dining facility that's new to you, or take your brown bag outside to a bit of shade.  But wherever you go, watch what's happening.  The range of ages, ethnicities, clothes, hairstyles and tattoos is astonishing.  And it's exciting.

Because of our size, UTSA will always have more students who live off-campus than on-campus.  So by that yardstick we'll be a commuter campus, but the term has come to mean more than the literal bed-count.  We generally mean a campus where students arrive, take a class, conduct business related to class - whether that's to pay a bill, go to the library, or meet their study group - and then they go away to their 'real life'.  In this case their relationship to the campus is purely transactional.

Now obviously I can't compare this semester to last fall, but I'm told we're breaking attendance records and participation norms all over the place.  As I walked across campus Wednesday I saw several large groups of students clustered around tables in the JPL dining area, and there was almost no available seating in the UC dining area.  The majority of students were not grabbing food and going to the next thing; they were hanging out with friends.  Sam Gonzales tells me that at 7:45 on Tuesday there wasn't a cardio machine vacant at the Rec Center - apparently it's the place to see and be seen.  This is not merely transactional, this is belonging. 

Parents are often upset when their new freshman says I'm going home and means college, but that comment is a recognition of a sense of connection to a place.  So is wearing a UTSA t-shirt (have you noticed they're all over the place?).  It is an acknowledgement that the university is a place they belong, a place they are interested in and care about.  And whether that connection is through a residence hall, SGA, a student organization, working at the Rec Center or the University Center, or an academic department, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that their 'real life' isn't lived elsewhere.  And that UTSA is one of their lives' many facets.

So as the fall semester starts, I think it's important for our language to tell the full story.  While there are tasks to do, places to improve and challenges to be addressed, we're not "just" a commuter campus anymore.  And a walk across the campus is all it takes to prove it!