Tag: Jennifer Cornish

Smoking in the rain; Welding students build new smoking shelters

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By Jonathan Baca, Copy Editor

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Planning and designs for the cov­ered shelters for CNM’s smoking sections have been submitted, and they will be fabricated and constructed by none other than the school’s own welding students, Welding instructor, Ron Hackney said.

The “smoking shacks” will be built by students of the Project Fabrication class, one of the final courses before Welding students test for their certificates, and they plan to build one to two shelters each semester the class is offered, Hackney said.

“These are folks who are already ready to graduate. Over three quarters of them are already certified welders, by industry standards, so they are pretty advanced students,” Hackney said.

Hackney said the proj­ect will be a great oppor­tunity for his students to get real world experience, being responsible for every aspect of a project, from planning and materials to fabrication and installation.

Executive Director of Multi-campus Operations Jennifer Cornish said that the idea for the project came from dis­cussions about the best way to create the smoking shel­ters they had promised to install after the new smok­ing policy was implemented.

“Since the inception of the new smoking policy, we knew that we needed to provide some shelter, if not all, than at least most of the smoking sections,” Cornish said.

A team was assembled to design and make the specifications for the shel­ters, and Cornish said the school’s architect had the idea to ask if the Welding department would be inter­ested in creating them.

Thomas “Hass” Saunders, Welding major and work study lab assistant, was the stu­dent who actually created the designs for the shelters as part of his class work, he said.

“It is essentially a bus stop with a couple of modifications made to it,” Saunders said.

Saunders took mea­surements of existing bus stop designs and CNM locations, designed the “smoking shack” on a CAD (computer aided drafting) program and made physi­cal blueprints, created a list of materials, and then got quotes for material costs, he said.

Saunders, who helps stu­dents with their class work as part of his work study job, said he feels the project will be a lot more valuable and fun for the students than their normal projects.

“It takes a whole dif­ferent meaning to welding. Instead of just doing differ­ent positions all day, now we can actually build some­thing, and it makes the stu­dents feel good at the same time,” Saunders said.

In addition to benches and a covered awning to protect smokers from the elements, the shel­ters will have perforated walls for ventilation, and so Security can easily see inside, Cornish said.

Another important feature will be solar panels on the roofs of each shel­ter, to power lights that will shine in the evenings, she said.

“We can’t run electric­ity out to all the shelters; that would have made it too expensive. But we want to make sure that they are safely lit,” Cornish said.

They would also like the openings of the shel­ters to be facing toward the south, so that in the summer the sun will gen­erally be at the back and the smokers will have more shade, she said.

Cornish said that the school’s Sustainability Team will be meeting with members of the Welding department sometime this week to go over the final details of the project, and to see if any of the loca­tions around the school’s many campuses will require any alterations to the original designs.

“I think it’s a really wonderful opportunity for our students to participate as a learning project, and it meets the needs of the students who want to use the smoking areas, and it is a sustainability project,” Cornish said.

Hackney said that since the plan is for the Welding program to eventually build a shelter for every smoking section on every campus, the project will likely become a major part of the curriculum for the Project Fabrication class for some time.

He said that while the instructors will act as quality control, set­ting specifications and inspecting each shelter on completion, the stu­dents will essentially be in charge of the project from start to finish.

“We have to make sure as an educational institu­tion that the students actu­ally use it as a learning out­come. It’s not like we’re trying to get free labor, we want to make sure that they can actually learn from it,” Hackney said.

In addition to the expe­rience for students, this project will also help the Welding department save some money, because the materials will be paid for out of a special budget created for the smoking sections.

Normally project costs come out of the Welding program’s budget, which is strained as it is, so Hackney said it is nice to be able to save a little money while giving his students a great project.

“It certainly helps, because every department gets billed for its metal, and it’s pretty expensive. But in the end, somebody’s got to pay for it, so we have to make sure that we don’t waste metal and things like that,” Hackney said.

Saunders said that as a student, he agrees that none of the students feel they are being taken advantage of, and that they are happy to be building something of value that will be used by people on campus for years to come.

“This is not free labor, this is essentially a great learning experience. In a nutshell, it’s kind of the students’ way of giving back to their school,” Saunders said.

Admins have smokers covered; Plans made to upgrade smoking sections

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Jonathan Baca, Copy Editor

The recent school – wide policy that all t o b a c c o products may only be used in designated smok­ing areas has left many students disgruntled and at the mercy of the elements, but not all is lost for smok­ers on campus as efforts are currently under way to help make these areas a little more comfortable, said Executive Director of Multi-Campus Operations Jennifer Cornish.

Administration has sub­mitted plans to build covered canopies over smoking areas to provide shade and protect students from rain and snow, and new benches have been purchased, some of which have already been installed on Main Campus, Cornish said.

“We wanted to make sure with these designated smok­ing areas, that there be a suffi­cient number of them, and we looked at creating some con­ditions that would make them comfortable,” Cornish said.

The project has already had to go through a long, prioritized budgeting process, but Cornish said it is now on the Master Plan list of projects, and funds should be available next July.

“It’s a pretty long, involved, complex process,” Cornish said.

In the meantime, smokers have had to trek across cam­puses, endure harsh weather, and even deal with unstable and possibly dangerous seating or no seating at all in order to have a cigarette, Biology major and smoker Marisa Julian said.

“I would really like to see a little bit more consideration for the smokers,” she said.

Julian said that during one smoke break, when she and a friend sat down on the same side of a circular metal picnic table in a smoking section on Main campus, the entire table was toppled and they had to scramble out of the way to avoid being hurt.

“It’s really difficult for us as smokers, having your only cigarette for the day, and you have to freeze, or get wet, or burn in the sun. It seems a bit ridiculous,” Julian said.

Radiology major Ginese Vigil said since smokers have been asked to make the effort to remove themselves from high-traffic areas and walk to the designated sections, which are often far from their classes, the least the school can do is to offer shaded areas.

“Smokers take into con­sideration the feelings of non-smokers by going to certain sections on campus. And in order to keep that consideration it would be nice to have canopies,” Vigil said.

The full project will not begin until next s u m m e r , but in the m e a n ­t i m e , C o r n i s h said that the a dmi n i s t r a ­tion wants to hear from the students about what their needs and concerns are in different areas of the campus.

On the website cnm. edu/smoke free, students can follow a link to a forum where they can make sug­gestions on the policy and the proposed project.

“People can submit their comments, questions or what­ever, and I’ll get back to them,” Cornish said.

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigs, have also been restricted to these sec­tions, and many students who use them disagree with the policy and do not think that they should fall into the same category as traditional cigarettes, said Vigil, who only uses e-cigs.

E-cigs do not produce the second-hand smoke of tradi­tional cigarettes, but instead vaporize a nicotine solution and emit odorless water vapor, according to Wikipedia.org.

Vigil said she thinks the restriction on e-cigs is due to misunderstand­ing, and thinks that people have not taken the time to educate themselves on the difference.

Cornish said the team that created the new policy included e-cigs in the ban because there has not been enough research on their true effects.

“We found that there is sig­nificant doubt in the scientific community around the health effects, and also whether or not the vapor includes impu­rities. We decided to include them because there is still a big question mark around them,” Cornish said.

The Food and Drug Administration has not released its official find­ings on e-cigs yet, but there have been several other studies done, many with conflicting findings.

Scientists from the University of Athens, Greece, found that “using an e-ciga­rette caused an instant increase in airway resistance that lasted for 10 minutes in the majority of the participants,” according to medicalnewstoday.com.

However, another study on e-cigs conducted by the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-Free Alternatives Association found that “with generally acceptable usage levels, there were no health dangers posed by an e-ciga­rette’s vapors,” according to digitaljournal.com.

Vigil said she does not think e-cigs should be allowed during class, out of respect for the teacher and the other students.

However, Vigil said that since she does not believe that the vapor causes any harm, she does not always follow the school’s current guidelines.

“There’s a couple build­ings where it’s easier, if I have a break, to just go into a hall or a restroom,” Vigil said.

Political Science major Jonathan Swenson said that he and many others use e-cigs as a way to quit smoking traditional ciga­rettes, and that the current restriction takes away some of the incentive for many people to do the same.

“If the school policy is really to help people quit smoking, they should give every advantage to people who switch to e-cigs,” Swenson said.

Cornish said she acknowledges that people like Swenson may have a valid point.

She said that if new studies were released showing that e-cigs were safe for their users and the people around them, the school might consider changing their policy.

“I think that all our decisions and policy should be based on good solid information. So while I can’t say that we would change it, I think that that would serve as a basis for looking at that,” Cornish said.