UT
NIVERSITY IMES
August 22, 2016
www.csulauniversitytimes.com
C A L I F O R N I A S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y, L O S A N G E L E S
Issue 213.01
ASI President Means Business
| Photo Courtesy of Joeseph Delgado | Photo Courtesy of Joshua Harris
Kayla Stamps discusses her vision as ASI President. Anthony Karambelas Staff Reporter Who’s ready for a new school year? Our new ASI President, Kayla Stamps, certainly is. The fourth year Communications major de-
servedly won the respect of an overwhelming majority of voters in last year’s ASI election. So who is she and what can we expect from her this year?
Event Services front desk in the University-Student Union, and it was there that she decided to get even more involved by joining a few campus clubs.
In her freshman year at Cal State LA, Stamps recalled that she never would have thought ASI would be in her future. Only until the beginning of last year did Stamps leave her job at Wells Fargo to get more involved on campus. She started working at the Information and
“In sitting there [at the front desk] and talking with students and engaging and seeing what was going on in the campus climate, I was like, there needs to be a change. As cliche as it sounds … Even in the clubs, people were vocalizing changes... [Continued on pg. 7]
The Library’s New Look
CSULA's library underwent construction during the summer session. Edward Saldana Contributor
Once the spring quarter ended, the Library’s Facebook page announced that there were big changes coming. There were signs all around the building saying “Big Changes Coming Soon!”. The Library just added Café 47 during this past spring break, but that was only the beginning of the changes that were going to occur.
Marrian Zhou with her coworkers at Beijing Today. | Photo Courtesy of Marrian Zhou
Journalism the Chinese Way Marrian Zhou
Managing Editor
What do they mean by “There’s no news in China”? Although I grew up in Beijing and moved to Los Angeles when I was 16, I finally realized that I did not know much about the society I came from. Through interning as a reporter, I had the chance to
explore a seemingly censored world. During the past two months, I worked at Beijing Today- an English newspaper serving the expat community in Beijing. It was founded by the Beijing City Municipal News Office and later operated under Beijing Youth Daily. The first day I walked into the Editor-in-Chief Wang’s office, he asked me what I would write and I said I could run
around the city and do news reporting. “There is no news in China, you should know that,” he said as he shook his head, as if I was too young to understand. Every Friday, Wang would host a meeting in the office and read us the “Notification” of the week- statements from the municipal government that restricted topics we could report on. If we did not follow the ... [Continued on pg. 5]
Edward The construction on the outside of the building was minor, as the main changes were on the inside of the building. The University Times spoke with Carlos Rodriguez, the newly appointed Dean of the University Library, to learn more about the changes implemented. Rodriguez began working at CSULA around six months ago, and knows all about college libraries as he worked on different campuses. He came to campus with big ideas to implement changes to make the library a more student-friendly atmosphere. “One of the goals of the refurbishing is to make the library not just a better environment but more friendly and welcomed,” Rodriguez said. The first floor is where the students will see the big changes, as Rodriguez said that they were getting new furniture for the first floor. During the summer, when you walked into the library, there was a white plastic curtain covering the service desk, and they installed a new service desk. Since the café opened up, he doesn’t want the students to grab food and leave,
he wants them to sit and relax on the new furniture. He wants the first floor of the library to be like the student union, where students can casually hang out. He wants to change the mentality, that the students are at the library because they need to print one thing out and then leave. He wants them to stay longer and for students to see it as another hangout destination like many areas around campus. He wants the first floor to have less computers and be a less production style environment. He wants the floors above to be more of a production atmosphere. The floors above had yellow caution tape, and that’s where the computers are going to go. The computers will move to the higher levels. He wants a different atmosphere on each floor of the library. If you want quiet and want to work on homework, or if you want to socialize, then you can go to the specific floors customized for each activity. Even on the floors above, Rodriguez is aware that not a lot of those study areas are open, especially the ones that go on both sides of the library, so his goal is to make them all available for the students. The goal is to utilize all the available space that the library has. All the changes are for the students and are geared to provide a great atmosphere for them. The basement levels A and B are quiet study hall areas. Level A was re-done and is now a silent study for the students who need to have complete silence, so they can concentrate on their classes. Level A is a room with desks spread out from another so each student can have their own private study space. Rodriguez’s goal is to have these most of these changes done before the start of the fall semester.