By Abigail Kohlberg

Students at Quincy University have been getting up early on Martin Luther King Jr., Day each year to give their time to the campus day of service. The event is held by Quincy University to give students the opportunity to easily engage in community service.

The services include work on campus, such as beautification, and work throughout the community. Some groups do yard work for the school and others do yard work at the homes of people who can’t do it for themselves. It’s a program that is fairly popular with students. There is a steady turnout, a majority of whom belong to a sports teams or are in the freshman class.

The program has been ongoing for a few years, and it has been improved upon in minor ways every year. These improvements include organizational methods or simply a better understanding of the roles within the group of people running the program.

This year, a more noticeable change took place. MobileServe was implemented last semester. It’s an app that keeps track of service hours.

There have been a few minor complaints about the new app. James Blessing ran into a problem caused by multiple entries made in the same day that seemed to conflict. He got it sorted out in the end, but it took some doing to fix the problem.

“It is still way better than the old way we used to [track volunteer hours], Blessing said.

That does seem to be the overwhelming sentiment. Out of a dozen students randomly asked, twelve out of twelve said they were satisfied with the new way of tracking service hours for graduation.

“I liked it better just because, with the packets they were very big and bulky and I also ran mine through the washer once, so that sucked. In that aspect, I liked MobileServe better, just because I probably won’t be doing anything like that to MobileServe,” Meaghan Cavellero, senior, said.

Some students work on their service hours in a place with little to no signal. It might be a very rural place where data signal just won’t reach, or it might be inside a school where signals are intentionally blocked, or an old building with very solid walls. However, the app does not run well in low signal, and offline it will not work at all.

“I think my issue is just that the junior high is centuries old, so the walls are very thick. But whenever I try to use [the app] anywhere else, the service organization option won’t show up,” Elivia Edge said.

Connectivity issues result in students going outside or away to get a signal and either coming back for, or chasing someone down for, a signature. Depending on what the service is, this could make logging hours more difficult.