BURNABY — Ageing, deteriorating and coming apart at the seams, members of SFU Graduate Student Society have been reported to be “a serious concern” to the well-being of the Burnaby campus and its prized mould and algae deposits, according to concerned students.
Several SFU students have told The Peak that they’ve noticed significant grad student infestation across campus, in classrooms, in stairwells, in the parkade, and even in the recently renovated washrooms where more often than not they’re covering up or obscuring popular campus mould deposits or celebrated structural faults.
Diane Peters, a third-year business student, who lives on SFU’s main campus and has seen the problem first hand brought to attention the grad student infestation problem last week and believes that serious and immediate action must be taken before undergraduates like her become infected with their disease.
“I love the broken stairs, crumbling concrete and mouldy classrooms at SFU . . . those things make me want to get out of here and get a job.” Peters explained, saying that there’s no better motivator to graduate than a serious breathing condition.
“But these grad students are dangerous, if I ever have to spend too long in a room with them I start thinking about getting another student loan, I feel a stirring to spend a couple years really getting to the bottom of ancient Mesopotamian accounting secrets . . . it’s infectious.”
Peters isn’t the only one concerned about the persistence of grad students on campus, SFU’s administration understands and sympathises with students but says that there just isn’t anything they can do.
“We completely get where these students are coming from but they need to realize that having them removed would be an enormous hassle and also extremely expensive” explained one representative for SFU who said that the school only has so much money to spend on non-terrible slogan related projects.
“We just don’t have funding to be able to survive without grad students right now but we’re working on preventative measures to, hopefully, keep them away in the future. We’re hoping to get some more mould growing and maybe expose a couple more particle boards in the washrooms . . . they seem to really hate that.”
While these are surely noble efforts, students are still not satisfied. This ineffectiveness has led Diane Peters and a group of undergraduate students to take action which so far has only sparked the creation of a report that lists things that annoy them about grad students, but this is unlikely to accomplish anything at all.
As for the mould and other rustic qualities of Burnaby campus, SFU is fully intent on preserving them despite grad students’ constant attempts to have them maintain the campus even just a tiny bit, a decision that can be appreciated by all students who come to school as an escape from their awful, clean, hygienic lives.
