by Ranjie Nocete | October 17, 2021
The Silliman University Student Government (SUSG) distributed a survey to determine the number of vaccinated SU students in compliance with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) to assess the readiness of the university for face-to-face classes.
The SUSG Secretariat Committee spearheaded the survey after being tapped by the Office of Student Services in order to determine how prepared the university is for face-to-face classes.
According to SUSG Secretariat Committee’s Chairperson, Enrica Dinopol, 4,203 students, comprising around 52 percent of the student population, answered the survey. Out of these respondents, 2,819 students had been fully vaccinated, with the remaining students either waiting for their second doses or their vaccination schedule.
Most students were vaccinated with the Sinovac vaccine (1,297), followed by the one dose Janssen/J&J (567), Pfizer (393), AstraZeneca (274), Moderna (213), Sinopharm (42), and Sputnik (33).
The survey ran for five days and closed last Wednesday, October 13th.
When asked if students are close to having face-to-face classes, Dinopol says, “I’m really hopeful, because we have a high chance of getting there. But I feel like it’s not just our school’s situation or how many people are vaccinated, but as well as the cases of Dumaguete City in general. Taking that into account, I’m just hopeful that by that time our pandemic response gets better, and we move on to the next year, we’ll be able to go back to face-to-face.”
“We [the Secretariat Committee] faced a lot of challenges. These included how to get the students’ attention to answer the survey. We tried different platforms to get as many respondents as we could in a short span of time. We mainly tried using the email, and it did help in gathering respondents. We also tapped the League of Governors to send the survey to their constituents, which was effective since we immediately saw a spike in the number of responses.” said Candace Yrad, vice-chairperson of the Secretariat Committee, when asked about the challenges they had encountered.
VP for Academic Affairs Dr. Earl Jude Cleope also mentioned the possibility of face-to-face classes during the Grand Konsulta, a student-admin consultation spearheaded by the SUSG Students’ Rights and Welfare Committee. “I’m really batting, at least, best effort, last quarter (2nd Semester), hopefully, March or April that you will be allowed to come face to face. If nothing bad happens, there is no reason why we will not have it,” stated VPAA Cleope.
The data gathered by the survey will be sent to CHED in order to help in the readiness assessment of Silliman University.
