Students or school wide clubs that wish to reserve a lecture room must complete an application form on EPIS (Ewha Portal Information System) Intranet and wait for a first level of approval from the Office of Student Welfare. If approval is granted, as a second stage, they must wait again for permission from the related building management office. Permission from the building management offices usually comes 48 hours before the reservation day. Generally, the application period takes about five to seven days.
The procedure for departmental clubs is similar, except that the first level of approval must be given by the administrative offices or the club’s department and college, rather than the Office of Student Welfare.
Jeong Eun-wha (Elementary Education, 3) says the current reservation system is inefficient. “I do not understand why the process has to take so long. You don’t face difficulty in making an early reservation if it is a meeting with a lot of people because the meeting time is then arranged a lot in advance. But smaller study groups are organized more frequently and spontaneously—which makes it very difficult to make a reservation in advance.”
Students also showed their discontent in relation to the application structure on the EPIS Intranet portal. Kim Ji-young (International Studies, 3) said that it was inconvenient to have to separately reserve multiple rooms for the same event. “I am the student representative of the Division of International Studies, and need to frequently reserve rooms for official student government body meetings—sometimes a couple of rooms at the same time. However, it is time consuming and bothersome to separately apply for simultaneous reservations and periodic meetings,” says Kim.
Jang Hye-won (Social Sciences, 1) said, “I don’t think we should have to be approved by both the administrative office and the management office. If students were only required to file an application with the building management office, then the procedure would be a lot simpler and take less time.”
Other universities do not have as complicated a system as Ewha’s. “We don’t even have to use the Internet or have to go through a waiting period when borrowing lecture rooms. All we have to do is get an application form from the Student Office and fill out the information. As soon as we complete the form, we can receive an official seal to show the security guard. The whole process takes about only 10 to 20 minutes,” said Lee Se-jeong (
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Kim Bong-ryeon, a staff member in the Office of Student Welfare, said that maintaining a strict system of limiting student reservations on the Intranet was necessary for two reasons. “First, the office wants to keep outsiders from taking up classroom space, so the system helps limit reservations to Ewha students. Also, the number of students who want to borrow classrooms has greatly increased these days. In order to balance supply and demand, the school has no choice than to have students make early reservations on the Intranet,” said Kim.
Kim added, “We also increased the number of rooms available in the Ewha Campus Complex to 37 classrooms and 41 seminar rooms to make sure enough space was available.”
caption: Students have to go through a complicated procedure to reserve a room.