Suggestions on improving upon SAO events

Students don’t come together for fun at UR. To address this, the Student Activities Office has planned weekends throughout the year to make this campus more of a community. Two of those weekends are Yellowjacket Days and WinterFest. The lack of campus-wide camaraderie is not due to the number of events, but to the quality of the events students have to choose from. Students prefer a few high-quality events to a lot of unexciting weekends.Time is a precious commodity for UR students. A student deciding whether or not to attend a festival has to balance the amount work left behind with the worthiness of the event. A student will no doubt choose more often to attend events that are exciting, and by the same principle will choose more often to avoid those deemed less worthy of their time. Many people remember bands like “Guster” and “Reel Big Fish,” as well as celebrity speakers such as Janet Reno, Bill Cosby and Senator Hillary Clinton. The ability to excite students is what makes Meliora Weekend and Dandelion Day popular among students. This is what the SAO failed to realize when they created these lackluster weekends like WinterFest and Yellowjacket Weekend. Top hip-hop artist Kanye West agreed to take his tour to two schools in our region, Cornell University and the Rochester Institute of Technology. What if our university followed suit, planning an outdoor event that featured a popular artist performing on the lawn? Undoubtedly the event would meet with success.The problem with SAO events is compounded by the poor publicity. Off-campus students often find it difficult to stay informed about campus activities. Even students living in university housing are too often out of the loop about things that are going on. One way the SAO could improve event advertising would be to make the Campus Club Connection Web site clearer. The site should implement a monthly calendar, rather than the current listings it now calls a “calendar.” Furthermore, a link to this calendar should be prominently displayed on http://www.sa.rochester.edu. There is a current link to CCC available on the Web site, but the less work students have to do to find things, the better.One final way the SAO could improve events would be to have a more effective feedback mechanism in place. Currently, the SAO relies heavily on student government and class council members to provide feedback about events. The SAO needs to solicit the advice of the less proactively involved students that it seeks to attract at its events. The best way to do this would be to provide a feedback forum on the Students’ Association Web site. This would allow students to leave anonymous critiques of events. The SAO would have an immediate way to determine whether students liked certain festivities and how they could be improved. In the future, we should see the big artists at Fauver Stadium during special weekends. We would find out about it by following a single link from the SA Web site, which would take us to a monthly calendar containing an active link to the event description. After attending the concert and partaking in the peripheral events, students could type a quick feedback to the SAO about the weekend on the SA site, which would lead to better events in the future.