A new initiative at the University of Kentucky is enabling faculty and staff to walk a mile in students’ shoes. The university’s “A day in the Life” program is enabling staff to experience a campus tour as if it were their first day on campus as a student.

With the swipe of a student ID card, Grand Rapids Community College is offering free laptop rentals to students. The service is being offered via vending machine, giving students an alternative to accessing the technology needed to support their academic work.

Stony Brook University has joined the growing roster of campuses to deploy reusable takeout containers in campus dining halls. As with other deployments, the initiative at Stony Brook is expected to cut both food and disposable container waste.

Princeton University has made it easier for students to share a meal with each other thanks to a new electronic meal exchange program that encourages more interaction between members of the university’s various eating clubs.

New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University has taken a proactive step toward opening a new revenue stream on campus. The university’s newest residence hall — a 96,000 square foot, seven-story facility — will convert to a 188-room hotel during the summer months.

We often overlook just how easy it can be to leverage campus card technology to improve the student experience. The women’s center at Tufts University has experienced just this by installing a card reader at its facility for the first time in a move that will expand availability to students.

Hofstra University has implemented new access privilege protocols for its resident assistants, revoking previously universal access rights to all campus residence halls. The revocation of access privileges marks the end of a pilot program that Hofstra’s Office of Residence Life had enacted to assist RAs in carrying out their duties.

Students at UC San Diego will soon be able to use their campus cards and TritonCash to pay for a number of essential health items from a campus “Wellness Vending Machine.” UCSD’s University Centers Advisory Board (UCAB) has also approved the new vending machine for sale of generic Plan B pills.

The trend in college mail services for some time now has been a tremendous influx of packages and a reduction in letter mail. It’s largely a reflection of the e-commerce boom and the arrival of more agile delivery services. Colleges across the country have felt this trend directly, and the latest to make refinements to its mailroom services is Boston College, where the volume of packages has inspired the university to transition to a new system to improve productivity for both staff and students.

Rollins College has consolidated student accounts, with the university’s finance department creating a new plan that merges off-campus dining and TarBUC$ into a single account. The newly merged account will enable student to use their funds in the same manner as before, and will even add more options for use of off-campus meal money.