Welcome back, Carolina collegiettes! Here at UNC, it’s the start of another vivacious school year (well, kind of vivacious, minus the construction). As you settle back into your routine of long days, late nights and party-filled weekends, it is important to stay focused on safety and awareness of your environment. College is the perfect time to live in the moment and it can be easy to forget yourself and your surroundings. Don’t feel anxious, collegiettes! We have three easy solutions to help you remain safe while maximizing your college experience.
1. Free apps are the best apps.
Let’s be real for a second. We live in a world that is lived on our phones. We have deep, emotional attachments to our phones because they are the one vital source to almost all people and information. If safety is a concern, use your phone as comfort. Recently, a free app called SafeTrek was released. This app is AMAZINGLY user-friendly. When you first install the app, it asks for all personal information so you are easily identifiable. In a situation where you feel unsafe, hold the screen down. If you let go, you have to key in a password in five seconds. After five seconds with the password not entered, the police will be notified. Since we have our phones ninety-five percent of the time, SafeTrek is an easy and reliable way to stay safe in and around campus. And it’s free. This is college. Mooch while you still can.
2. ALERT!
Just to make your phone even more efficient, another tool specific to campus is Alert Carolina. Alert Carolina sends texts and notifications with just about any information that could be relevant to the student body and faculty of Carolina. Most students already have Alert Carolina in use on their phones. If you haven’t already, register your number with Alert Carolina so you can receive information about campus. Ok, it can be annoying when you get six Severe Thunderstorm Warning notifications in a day but it won’t be nearly as inconvenient in the instance that danger disrupts the Carolina community (and if Alert Carolina doesn’t have information, Spotted or Overheard at UNC will do the trick for social media friendly collegiettes).
3. Use campus resources.
If apps aren’t quite cutting it for you, there is Safe Walk. Safe Walk is a campus organization that dispatches students to walk with you at night. The staff are well-trained by the Department of Public Safety so don’t be nervous to try it out! There are three methods of contacting Safe Walk: an online request, giving them a call or visiting a team at the Undergraduate Library, Davis Library or the Student Union. It is more reassuring to have another person walking with you and keeps you calm if you start to feel anxious or uncomfortable. Safe Walk is a great resource to utilize and is free to all students (remember what I said about mooching).
So UNC collegiettes, do you feel safer already?