Group coordination

There is always something happening on campus. On any given weekday, the Princeton campus is inundated with high-profile guest speakers, study breaks, and movie screenings. On weekends, every imaginable theatrical space on campus showcases some form of performance. If anything, the Princeton campus is over-saturated with events.

Yet, despite the plethora of events, often many of these worthwhile events go unnoticed or ignored. I remember attending earlier in the semester a poorly advertised conference entitled the "State of the World." Participating in this conference was an impressive list of prominent authors and academics in the realm of international relations. However, to my own disappointment, I found myself among a company of five other undergraduates as I sat listening to a panel discussion.

In a more recent example of poor planning, in the span of a little more than a week, three separate but very similar events were scheduled commemorating the ten year anniversary of the Rwanda genocide. Though interesting, all three events went by fairly quietly without causing any of the stir that the organizers of the three events had hoped for. Rather than provoking a storm on campus, these events became lost in the sea of lectures on campus.

The truth is the sheer volume of events on campus greatly hinders the ability of these events to reach the community. High profile guest speakers and controversial movies about important issues get lost when they are advertised in a bulletin board that is layered with flyers. Similarly, how do you sort out events from all the mass emails that you receive constantly throughout the day?

Any student who has organized an event on campus understand that the biggest challenge is not organizing the event (though that can be a logistical nightmare of its own well worth another 700 words), but rather getting the event out to the student community and creating the excitement that would draw in a crowd. This is particularly tough when you are competing with so many other simultaneous events, some of which could very well target the same portion of the Princeton population.

The solution isn't more colorful flyers, nor is it a larger email list. The solution is to create a forum where organizations on campus can meet and find out what other groups are planning.

With such a proliferation of organizations on campus, rarely are there groups without similar counterparts on campus. Through this forum, groups will be aware of each other's activities and be provided the opportunity for collaborative efforts. Organizing events together will not only eliminate the possibility of redundancy but it also gives events higher status on campus by combining the resources and constituents of several organizations. Greater resources mean that events would be better organized, better advertised and ultimately better attended.

Efforts toward a greater integration of campus events have already been undertaken by both ODUS and the USG. Recently, ODUS offered student organizations the Bildner Fund — a fund that encourages campus groups to pursue collaborative efforts that help to enhance the diversity of the Princeton community. Similarly, the USG Projects Boar at the beginning of the semester organized a series of informal study breaks where the new leaders of various student organizations met each other.

Unfortunately, both of these attempts at integrating campus groups provided only a temporary dialogue among groups. What this campus needs is a constant stream of communication among groups so that collaboration and information exchange occurs throughout the school year.

The most obvious forum for this would be ODUS. As the central hub for all student organized activity on campus, ODUS has the ability to connect groups. Though ODUS serves as the clearinghouse for all events on campus, it often fails to inform the community of what it has cleared. Students can take on that task, but ODUS must provide the environment for collaboration.

There are many issues and interests that need to be addressed on campus. Fortunately, there are also plenty of passionate students who work hard at it. In order to make sure that these issues and interests really get across to the Princeton community there needs to be some serious rethinking about the process in which these events come into being. Kyle Meng is a civil and envionmental engineering major from Chappaqua, N.Y. He can be reached at kmeng@princeton.edu.