It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. You have a meeting at six o’clock. You’ve had a full day of classes, you couldn’t go to sleep the night before, and you have five hours of homework. But you look down at your phone, expecting a Snapchat from someone, (because the story you just posted was hilarious) and you see a text from the person you share work service with, asking you where you are.

Last year, this crisis happened only once a week, but this year Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are all cleaning days. This is because the Administration decided to change the way work service is run.

Executive Director of MSMS Germain McConnell detailed the changes to work service.“The changes that are happening to work service are really simply dividing the responsibilities more evenly. In the past we noticed that students would do 15 minutes of work, and some would do an hour of work a week, and that just isn’t really fair to some students. And another part of that is we are getting smarter about utilizing our students.”

He was then asked “Is there any correlation between work service and better academia?” to which his response was: “I can’t say that, but when we talk about our four ideals, community, service, scholarship, and creativity. Of course service and community have a part to play in it … If I see a piece of paper on the ground, you know I’m not going to say ‘Well so-n-so is responsible for that, I’ll leave it there.’”

Jenny Nguyen, SGA president had a different view on work service. “While I do think work service is important, the four-day-a-week work service tends to take away from my academic pursuits and take a lot of time out of my day.”

However, Haley Hsu disagrees: “I think that people start to appreciate more of what we have. People start to respect materials that we have like lab — they don’t want to waste it because they know what it’s like to have to clean it up.”