Dedicated to organizations and events with Southern Miss, a new website and free application for iPhone and Android, EagleLink, has launched.
Assistant Vice President for Student Life Denny Bubrig, Ph.D., worked on the idea of EagleLink since April 2017. He said a common issue brought up to him was that Southern Miss had no centralized student engagement system. He believes EagleLink will fill that.
“The ultimate goal that we are heading towards is a one-stop-shop for students in the USM community where they can find a comprehensive calendar of campus events and the organizations and different entities where students can engage and become more a part of the fabric of USM,” Bubrig said.
Bubrig stated EagleLink is designed to give students the ability to reach out in an online setting to get information about things that affect them outside of the classroom.
“[EagleLink] is a great way for the student body to keep up to date with different events and programming going on around campus,” SGA President McKenna Stone said.
Bubrig said they looked into four systems, but landed on the what is now the EagleLink platform. They have been working on populating and personalizing the site since January 2018. A soft launch over the summer allowed organizations to try out the new system and provide feedback before being made available to the general public.
“I guess you can say this fall is the first real semester of usage,” Bubrig said. “In six weeks, we have gotten approximately 30 percent of campus up and running, and 250 entities active on [EagleLink] right now.”
The Student Government Association is one of those entities. SGA President Stone said she loves EagleLink, and SGA is transitioning from their previous platform, MachForm, to EagleLink.
Stone said EagleLink will make getting information much more simplistic. “I think it is going to take a little while to create a culture for [EagleLink],” Stone said. “Once [organizations] all adopt [EagleLink], I think it will benefit the entire community.”
“[EagleLink] is a really cool way for internal and external communication,” Stone said. “It has a lot of functions, like surveying the student body, hosting applications and getting feedback.”
“We started looking around and Eagle this and that, everything we could think of was already taken,” Bubrig said. “We started thinking about the purpose of the site, and the purpose was to connect Golden Eagles. We are linking them with opportunities to engage, and out of that came EagleLink.”
One issue Bubrig wants students to be aware of is that EagleLink does not function on Internet Explorer and to use other browsers.
“There are a couple browsers that it has trouble with, but the flipside of that is the tech support we have from the host company is usually pretty good,” Bubrig said. “They can usually be on task with us within five minutes and fairly quickly solve most problems.”
The mobile version of EagleLink as well as Presence Checkpoint, an app dedicated to students checking in to events, can be downloaded in the Apple and Android store now.
