The Center for Student Involvement & Leadership (CSIL) has been struggling with increasing student involvement in activities and organizations on campus and is now looking for support to find a viable solution.
At the Nov. 17 ASUW meeting, CSIL Director Jeremy Davis spoke to ASUW about what CSIL provides to students. Davis also presented concerns of limited student involvement to ASUW in hopes of finding more solutions to improve engagement on campus.
“During the pandemic, we really struggled with the narrative ‘There’s nothing to do’,” Davis said. “Across the board, our engagement is not what it used to be.”
While the campus has become considerably more active compared to the height of the pandemic, it is still struggling to reengage students.
The concern surrounding this limited engagement is that students may not be getting the benefits of such exposure, either through direct involvement in clubs or organizations or even through event attendance.
“If they’re not engaged, they may not have a network to lean on,” Davis said, broadly referring to the benefits of having a social network on campus.
CSIL directly involves organizations including 7220 entertainment, ASUW itself, and the Branding Iron; however, it also works with RSOs across the entire campus, working to establish and promote as many events as it can.
At this time, organizations like ASUW and the Branding Iron do not have the level of support they would expect to see. CSIL reached out to ASUW for insights on this issue.
“When we had a whole year online it was hard to differentiate homework and [free time]” Senator Riley Talamantes said.
The return to campus was discussed as a primary reason for lower engagement, as students may not be used to this style of coursework still.
“Students are readjusting to what it’s like to be [on campus]” Senator Hannah Rhymes said.
Expanding upon this topic, Rhymes also said that academic expectations of students have also likely changed.
Rhymes and other senators presumed that homework and expectations may have increased in some courses as professors may feel they need to “make up” for last year.
In addition to the sentiment that students are readjusting to life on campus, Davis also noted that students are spending far less time on campus and in non-classroom areas. This is presumed to be because students have far fewer in-person courses, so they do not stay on campus between class periods.
When presenting possible solutions, some senators argued that marketing should be readjusted to better suit the student population.
One senator recommended attempting to reach students who are not active on social media with a more direct physical marketing campaign. This senator referred to this as, “Going after them and not trying to get them to come after us.”
This same senator recommended placing an events tab on the WyoWeb page. The ability to do this was not discussed directly, but it did see support from other senators, recommending it be more visible to students.
Summarizing these recommendations, most senators involved in the discussion said that events were simply hard to find or discover without prior knowledge of them.
With these recommendations in mind, Davis left the meeting optimistic that student involvement could be improved for both organizations and students alike.
