Every Monday and every Thursday, NYPIRG interns have to go to meetings with our supervisor Jenna Bessette based on what are upcoming events that we should look forward to as well as our plans on working within that event. On March 28th, Jenna had a meeting with the interns about an NYPIRG campaign called “Student Bus Rider Platform”. Student Bus Rider Platform is about making changes in New York to address Mayor Adams when it comes to students having easy access to their nearest transportation within their communities to get to school and back home as well as making bus transportation affordable since bus fare is expensive. The changes are having more bus lanes that are near the people about 30 miles, permanently capping the OMNY system program which I agree with since I hate it myself, funding bus fare improvements, and much more. For the “Student Bus Rider Platform” campaign to be a success as well as get the message across to the mayor, the NYPIRG interns have to walk around campus with a sign-on letter sheet so that students could write in their information to show support for making change within the bus transit system.

After the meeting, I immediately got started with the task for students to sign the “Student Bus Rider Platform” petition sheet even though most of the students weren’t at school since the majority of the students have online courses thanks to COVID. After one week of explaining myself to the students on campus about the campaign as well as spending long hours trying to find signatures from the students to sign it, I was able to complete five pages of student signatures. Wow, that was intense.