Leadership from the Associated Students of WNMU was recently in Santa Fe to advocate for their legislative requests. L-R: Arnav Arkanath, Brenda Dominguez, Rebekah Stevens, and Carlos CarranzaSILVER CITY—A team of leaders from the Associated Students of Western New Mexico University (ASWNMU) were recently in Santa Fe to advocate for requests they have made to the NM Legislature.

ASWNMU is requesting $300,000 for upgrades to the university's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and $100,000 for residence hall improvements.

ASWNMU President Brenda Dominguez, a graduate student pursuing an MBA degree, explained that the new VDI will give students "remote access to any digital resource we have on campus from home."

Dominguez has felt the need for the VDI first-hand when she was an undergraduate at WNMU. "When I took calculus as a student," she explained, "there was specific software that you could only use if you were on Wi-Fi from the school. If you were not here, you could not use it. … The virtual desktop allows students who are in Deming or in Gallup or anywhere they take their classes from to access any sort of academic tool that our computers have."

"A lot of times," said Dominguez, "our students might not have the newest version of Word or Excel, and they might need that to get through a class."

She explained that while the university currently has VDI, it does not have the capacity that is needed, causing it to sometimes become unusable.

The $300,000 that ASWNMU is requesting, said Dominguez, "would include making the computer labs in Deming and Gallup remotely connected to our IT here on campus, so if anything crashes or anything needs to be updated, our team no longer has to travel to be able to address it."

The second request from ASWNMU is for water bottle filling stations and security cameras for the residence halls.

"We do not have water fountains in the new dorms," explained Dominguez. "And the ones in Centennial [Hall], you can't fill your water bottles. They are the really old kind."

Dominguez noted how important it was for students, especially the many student athletes that live on campus, to stay hydrated. Students currently over-rely on bottled water, which is neither environmentally sustainable nor easy on the students' budgets, she indicated.

The residence hall request also includes security cameras for Mustang C, a residence hall that currently has blind spots in the hallways.

Security cameras, said Dominguez, "help our students feel safer. Having a camera there deters a lot of behaviors, so we wanted to be able to request that as part of our dorm safety improvements."

Dominguez said that she and the other officers that went to Santa Fe were grateful for the opportunity to meet with the Governor and Legislators and advocate for the ASWNMU request. "It is nice to have students up there to advocate for what really matters," she said. "We are a higher learning institution, and what we are trying to do is get students educated, get them the resources they need and the support they need to succeed. … Despite everything going on around us, the whole goal of this institution is to get people an education."