SB Life, the virtual and interactive system where students can explore and maintain relations with clubs and organizations, has made changes that are making it easier for students to get more involved on campus.
The SB Life system was created on Aug. 6, 2012, by three women, Diane Redo, Kimberly Stokely and Karen Lee and has grown into a database that maintains and monitors approximately 360 recognized clubs and organizations.
“We purchased the system through the Division of Student Life to have one place for all our register groups to be able to connect their registration to the everyday happenings of the club,” Diane Redo, assistant director for student activities, said.
Redo and Stokely started work on this program two and a half years ago and have now enacted a five-year plan to make SB Life flourish into something bigger.
“We worked on it for so long and to actually see it grow and to watch it get bigger and bigger is so fun,” Redo said. “And for people to give us positive feedback is exciting. I feel like we are ahead of the game.”
As of now, SB Life is still in the developmental stages where students are learning how to register their groups and how to optimize their potential by creating pages for their clubs and organizations.
In addition, SB Life is teaching students how to send messages, explore the bulletin board and browse through the different clubs and organizations on campus.
“I used SB Life during freshman year when I was first trying to get involved on campus,” Justin Maietta, sophomore sociology major, said. “I also use it every now and then to see what’s happening around campus during any given week if I know I’ll have some free time, and I always find something interesting going on.”
Each page can be modified and personalized by the group officials so students can see their mission statements, events, rosters, photo galleries and any documents and forms.
“I love the fact that on SB Life we can customize our page,” Katie Bogler, senior Environmental Studies and president of the Alpha Sigma Alpha sorority, said. “Every organization on campus is unique and this option is a great way to express that over a public forum.”
In addition to registration and creating pages, student groups can also track how many people attend their events through the swipe system, which is a machine that students slide their ID cards through that keeps track of who was in attendance.
Although, according to Student Activities, monitoring attendance is not mandatory, it is an option if a group or clubs should want to use it.
Coupled with keeping track and communicating among the group on SB Life, there is now the option of running elections through the program.
Redo said that she hopes groups will take advantage of this to make things “more fair” and help with “transition year to year.”
“I don’t want to throw all the changes out there just yet,” Redo said. “I don’t want students to be overwhelmed and be like oh this is horrible. So it is a slow task for now. It is just overall exciting to see the growth and I’m looking forward to more.”
Diane Redo • Sep 4, 2013 at 2:20 pm
To check out the homepage of SBLife where you can see many events that are happening on campus visit
stonybrook.edu/sblife