The Facts: N.C. State and its student organizations offer a plethora of campus activities for students to learn about a variety of topics while having fun in the process. This week alone campus is hosting its first annual Diversity Week, annual Agricultural Awareness Week, Graduate Studies Week and Engineering Week, along with the campaigning week for Student Body Elections.
Our Opinion: While these events are enlightening and enjoyable opportunities for students, the overabundance of them all in the same short time frame is not only an inconvenience for students, but compromises these events’ purposes to inform, entertain and raise awareness.
This week Alpha Zeta is hosting their annual Agricultural Awareness week in the Brickyard to spread the importance of agriculture not only to the University, but to students’ lives. Alongside the barnyard in the Brickyard, candidates for next year’s student leadership positions are campaigning for students’ votes. These events are accompanied by Howl for Diversity Week across campus with various events throughout the week and Engineering Week on Centennial Campus. N.C. State student organizations are known for their interactive events to spread awareness of various causes and information to the student body; however, their ability to plan these events with one another has lessened the significance of these events because of their similar timing.
These events cause traffic jams across campus, making students frustrated at student organizations or even the causes they represent merely because they’re in the way. The events going on this week, officially or unofficially, do offer exciting experiences for students, but at the cost of students being forced to choose what events to attend. While few students might be interested in more than one of these events, students who are interested in what’s going on in several are still paying for the lack of planning on the organizations’ part.
As a student organization, it is pivotal you not only spread your cause or knowledge with the student body, but demonstrate your support for other organizations in their events. This is done by communicating with one another to plan events that complement each other, rather than compete for students’ interest.
The importance of these events is to educate and entertain students. If this is to be achieved, the planning aspect of these events should have had a more effective structure to it. Organizations should meet and discuss their ideas to plan for their individual events. This communication could even garner support for the underdogs of student organizations with the support from other organizations. This would not only allow more support for individual organizations from fellow organizations, but also would cut down on the overabundance of events during the same time period.
Events, like the annual Alpha Zeta Agriculture event, are ones that has been a tradition at N.C. State for years. Other student organizations should have had the foresight that this event falls on specific dates, and if they did not communication between the organizations should have revealed it. The campaigning and election process should have corresponded with all organizations on their week of advertising themselves so they would not interfere with other student organizations’ events. A mere lack of communication is the culprit of these clusters of events around campus.
The solution to such a common problem across the entire University is to open the lines of communication. While candidates in the upcoming election include this line in their platform, students and their organizations should take the first steps towards this solution. If we want students to attend all of these events, and not just a select few, these organizations should work together so they all may succeed.
