Featured Image: Dorothy Yanku-Palmer | Courtesy
I have been a student at VWU since 2020 and I have seen student activity events with very little student involvement as well as student activity events with a lot of student involvement.
Reasons I have heard for students not coming are because it is too overstimulating with noise and crowds, they did not see it being advertised, they have class or simply they do not have the time to come to it.
Some of these include dances, the belly flop contest, sometimes trivia nights, and a handful of other activities.
The events on campus that tend to get larger student involvement are midnight breakfast, the annual Christmas tree lighting and the Carnevil Halloween event.
These events tend to be during times when there are no classes or sporting events and are advertised by word of mouth as well as by flyers all around campus.
Events that also get larger turnouts tend to have incentives, because people love having the chance to win stuff for free, as well as getting free items just for showing up.
I have had many different ideas to help to get a lot more involvement from students for lots of events.
One of which can be having an event held longer or twice in one day, or having it last longer to give students multiple options of when they can come.
Another option is to have both the regular event and that same event but make it adaptable for those who get overstimulated or overwhelmed at the regular events.
Being able to have adaptable activities and events on campus, allows all students who want to attend to have that opportunity to go without having to worry.
Another way that can help to get more student engagement is to have students provide ideas for events that they want to see as well as have the student body vote on polls for events they want to see done.
Some other ways to help promote more involvement at events are to advertise the VWU Student Engagement as well as the Off the Hook social media accounts more to the students.
Lots of students either do not have social media accounts or they did not know that there were social media accounts advertising these events.
I believe that the Office of Student Engagement is doing anything and everything that they can think of when it comes to trying to spread the word when events are coming up.
I also believe that with time, these events will gain more engagement from the students and that hopefully there will be more events that are suited to more people.
Ultimately, in time it would be awesome to see students more involved in the events on campus, but in order to do so there also needs to be some changes like mentioned above.
Giving students the capability to give input on what they want to see on campus is probably the best way to achieve higher student involvement.
At the end of the day, it is extremely important to keep in mind that the student community is very broad, and you may not be able to please everyone.
If an event is able to reach at least half of the community, then I say that is an incredible start.
Will I see any of this in my time remaining on campus, probably not, but I hope that there is change and evolution with the events on campus later down the road.
Dorothy Yanku-Palmer is a senior special education major. In her freetime, she enjoys hanging out in the Batten Student Center and is a part of several clubs on campus. She can be contacted at dpyankupalmer@vwu.edu.
By: Dorothy Yanku-Palmer
