Office of Student Life and Campus Diversity
Student Life
After COVID-19 event guidance was released in late summer 2020, the Student Life and Campus Diversity team finalized a programmatic approach with the assistance of re-entry committee members and students. Everyone was in agreeance that we wanted to make sure we are doing our best to still provide an engaging college experience outside of the classroom and assist where we could to create co-curricular learning opportunities as well. Student Life and Campus Diversity provided events and services to students in a 3-prong approach resulting in having in-person, giveaways, and virtual events. For all in-person and giveaways, the Dean of Students has been and will continue to be in close communication with campus leadership to make sure all EHS guidance and campus protocols are being followed and met.
In-Person: In previous years, Student Life and Campus Diversity would have make and take events. Items would be purchased in bulk, shared, and students would gather in fellowship and fun. Due to COVID, we shifted the make and take to take and make. This allowed us to create the same or similar events that students enjoyed but having them available for use on their own time in their own place.
To achieve this, items were purchased either still in bulk and separated or individually prepacked, depending on the item. The Student Life staff then created 200-500 individually pre-packaged take and make supplies for students to pick up, along with instructions on how to DIY the item. These take and make items consisted of supplies to create coasters, watercolor mugs, canvas painting and more.
One program that was physically in-person, approved through campus and system event submissions. Student Life hosted an on-campus drive-in movie for students, which successfully followed all protocols.
Giveaways: After conversations with students and brainstorming ideas, we came up with a list of items to give away to students, totaling up to 500–700 giveaways per week. Items have been considered based on cost, availability, storage, student buy-in as well as EHS guidance. The same as make and take items, all these giveaways were prepped and displayed with COVID-19 guidance in mind. Some of these items included t-shirts, water bottles, key chains, plants, and so much more.
Virtual: Our vendors did the best they could during these times, having to shift the way they offered programs as well. While the virtual programs did not go over as well, we still had students attending. Some of these events included caricature artists, art events, bingo, game nights, create your own signs, speakers, and more. It was decided that while we can save money and create our own items that some of our vendors were providing to us, we didn’t want to take away the virtual interaction as we were able to reach online students as well this way. In addition to the vendors, members of the staff hosted a virtual student activities fair, interview faculty, staff, and students, and created a welcoming environment to learn about resources.
Career and Accessibility hosted virtual programmatic events this past fall and spring with workshops, webinars, and program sessions. The offices have created a very robust list of items in which they will had available for the fall and spring semester, still including a career fair, virtual of course.
Throughout the fall semester, these programmatic efforts reached over 7,000 individuals. While students would like to get back to events they have seen in Fall 2019, they were very appreciative of the offerings we were still able to provide and to still give them opportunities to feel like they belonged. Even through COVID, we were able to reach more students through programmatic outreach than we ever have in the past. We heard from a large portion of individuals that have never been able to sit down or come to events before due to student teaching, nursing clinicals, or back-to-back classes. Moving forward, we will still be incorporating ideas from this past fall and spring so we can continue to reach as many students as possible.