Contest seeks videos on alcohol use for freshman orientation

The Health Promotion and Wellness Services division of University Health Services (UHS) is holding a contest for original student videos that depict the social scene at Princeton and dispel myths about high-risk drinking on campus.

The division recently sent an e-mail to some students calling for submissions to its Social Scene Video Competition.

The winning video will be included in the alcohol education program for the Class of 2013 as part of its orientation next fall and may also be featured on the Princeton University homepage, according to the contest guidelines. Videos also cannot show students consuming alcohol or being intoxicated.

The competition is open to submissions from all University students and student groups

The video competition was designed to produce “a good peer-to-peer educational tool,” Director of Campus Life Initiatives Amy Campbell said in an e-mail.

Through these videos, current Princeton students will introduce incoming freshmen to the University’s social scene, and this will foster an environment of “students talking to other students about the social scene,” said Campbell.

Campbell also co-chairs the Alcohol Coalition Committee (ACC).

In past years, all incoming Princeton freshmen have been required to complete only the standard AlcoholEdu for College program, which is not tailored to the culture at Princeton. Including the presentation of a student-generated video about Princeton “will give us the ability to tailor a generic product into a more Princeton-specific product,” Campbell said.

“The University could have created its own introduction to AlcoholEdu for College, but we’re interested in students’ perspectives,” Campbell added. “This whole approach is in keeping with ACC’s approach of incorporating student voices.”

Next fall, freshmen will watch the video before completing the AlcoholEdu for College online program. The video, Campbell said, will ideally “focus on some of the themes we’ve found to be important, such as the importance of responsibility.”

On its website, UHS provides examples of such myths about the Princeton drinking culture that it hopes to disprove. It reports that, contrary to the assumption that “everyone at Princeton University drinks … according to a 2008 survey of Princeton University undergraduate students, 26.8 percent of students did not consume any alcohol in the past 30 days [before they supplied their responses].”

The winning video from this competition will be chosen to address misconceptions that incoming freshmen might have of the Princeton social scene.

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The guidelines for submissions are relatively open-ended, to allow for creativity, Chris Chandler ’10, the student co-chair of the ACC, said.

“I think that they left out … specific suggestions in order to leave the competition open to interpretation, so that the creators of the videos would have the freedom to portray the social scene as they know it, and then the video which best represents the campus as a whole can be chosen,” Chandler said in an e-mail.

This video contest is the product of the efforts of the Education Working Group of the ACC, a group that includes students, faculty and administrators.

Because of the importance of eating clubs to Princeton’s social scene and drinking culture, the working group met with members of the Interclub Council (ICC).

“The ACC recognizes how central the eating clubs are to the Princeton social scene, and so it will probably be important to include information about the clubs in order to touch all the major points for a successful video,” Chandler explained.

“During development of the recommendation [presented by the ACC to UHS], a member of the Education Working Group met with the Interclub Council to make sure the project would be of interest to the eating clubs,” Campbell added. “They were very supportive.”

ICC adviser Tim Prugar ’06 cited this student-generated video project as “a sign of UHS being very responsive to the concerns, complaints and observations of eating club presidents.”

“For years now, the eating club presidents have been trying to draw attention to the fact that high-risk, on-campus drinking — particularly amongst freshmen and sophomores — is creating a medically unsafe, potentially disastrous situation at Princeton,” he said.

The deadline for students to submit their work is April 13. Campbell said that, while several students said they were interested in participating in the contest, there have not yet been any submissions.