Dickinson Gateway Passwords

                      Not long after we all got settled in here at our new home, Dickinson College, we finally got used to how things work around here. We learned our way around the campus and threw away our no longer needed campus maps. We understood what our professors expected of us and learned to balance homework, socialization, and the occasional call home to inform our mothers that we are, in fact, still alive and well. We discovered how to navigate the Gateway website and some of us even customized our Web outlook email page. Then, one day when signing into our accounts on a Dickinson public computer, a warning popped up unexpectedly informing us that our passwords would expire in 11 days. At first, most of us didn’t think anything of this and just ignored it, until the next day it said our passwords would expire in 10 days. Thus some of us realized, this was a real countdown and not a mistake to simply be ignored. Some of us took the hint and changed our passwords. Then again, some of us again, just ignored it, hoping it would go away. After ten days passed, we were forced to change our passwords. Some even claimed to have been locked out of gateway. Why is it that the College forces us to change our passwords on a regular basis? Was there an incident in the past that inspired a change in students’ security? Do you think it is the responsibility of the College to enforce this routine of changing passwords and ensuring higher levels of security to students, or is it the responsibility of the students themselves to pick a secure password and change it according to when they feel they need higher security? If you weren’t forced to change your gateway password every so often, would you change it at all?