Instead of walking downstairs to pick up packages, most students living on campus now have to leave their residence halls to receive their textbooks, care packages and other mail.
Housing and Residence Life and OU Mail Services came together to establish a single mail center on each residential green, according to an OU news release.
Students living on East Green can pick up their mail in Jefferson Hall, those on West Green can pick up mail in Ryors Hall and South Green residents can retrieve their mail from Mackinnon Hall. Students will receive emails that their packages have arrived and are ready for pickup at their designated mail center.
The new mail centers will be open from noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. They will be closed on Sundays.
Pete Trentacoste, the executive director of Housing and Residence Life, said in the news release that this new mailing system was created to make residence halls safer by limiting other people’s access and also to provide a better delivery service. The front desks at multiple residence halls also found it difficult to store multiple packages at once, according to the release.
Additionally, the U.S. Postal Service notified the university that it would change its delivery routes. The new routes would make it more difficult for the postal service to deliver to multiple locations on campus.
Adam Bower, manager of OU Mail Services, said in the news release that the postal service and other providers such as UPS and FedEx were delivering to 28 residence hall locations at OU.
Some students have found the new mail center operations to be an inconvenience.
Larkin Giesige, a sophomore studying communication science, said the new mail centers could be annoying.
“It all depends on how busy they will be,” she said. “I haven’t used (the mail center) much yet this year.”
Genna Heileman, a sophomore studying special education, does not think too negatively about the new mail centers.
“Sure, it may be inconvenient and take extra time to get there, but it won’t be super terrible,” she said.
Bower also said in the news release that he hoped more services, such as shipping, stamps and supplies for shipping, would be added to the new mail centers on campus in the future.
