Chartwells Rebrand

This semester Chartwells, SUNY Plattsburgh's on campus food service has decided that it was going to rebrand itself and become more appealing to students. As a part of their rebrand they are changing their name from Chartwells to "Campus Dining." Included in this rebrand are new uniforms, name tags, vehicles and other various things.

The rebrand is interesting and important to me because I am currently doing a practicum for Chartwells (soon to be Campus Dining) where I am trying to improve the accessibility and knowledge of our on campus catering options. The practicum started out from my Public Relations Management class last year during my Fall 2013 semester. Initially my group started out as the ones who were against Chartwells and wanted to see what our other options were for on campus dining services. My group all agreed that we thought that Chartwells prices for their portions were expensive and not worth it, however, through our research of other universities and their dining options we found that we really do have an affordable and flexible meal plan option. We found that our school has a large selection of places to eat at at various times while other schools have one or two options that they can only eat at during certain times of the day. Here on campus we have dining locations that are open from the morning until midnight almost every day throughout the semester. We also have various meal plans that are customizable to fit our needs where as other schools only have one or two very expensive options that they can pick from.

Through this research we learned to embrace Chartwells and tried to find out a way to help them out and make students appreciate their services more. We ended up picking catering because almost everyone in the group had no idea how to access our on campus catering services or that we even had any. By doing this we found out the real problems with our services and worked to improve it. I am glad that I am still working with improving our on campus catering service because it has been a great learning experience and has given me real-world experience. I feel I am more prepared to deal with difficult situations and last minute changes when they occur thanks to this experience. What I learned and am still learning from this practicum is that don't judge a situation before you actually do your research and really get into the small details of things.