Emma Frank ‘24 & Genny Conlon ‘24 Staff Writers
Source: Louisiana Weekend
While there is an inherent challenge in having to adjust to the change in format, college students’ natural desire to make connections made me optimistic that we can create a variety of programs in Student Life. Some projects have been successful, such as Welcome Week’s game night or the Involvement Fair, and others less so, but I feel we understand the climate of things a bit better each time Immaculata presents a new activity.
Ultimately, if we can receive feedback from the students we are trying to serve we can make improvements to create the best environment possible during this time. One thing I was proud of was the approach to New Student Orientation this summer. It was certainly a challenge to engage first time freshmen and transfers in this new format, but there were some great student leaders helping to push the boundaries for what we thought was possible virtually. If you take a look at the new Orientation Instagram created this summer, iu_NSO2020, there are a lot of programs and promotions that attempt to connect students with what they need. They also created an NSO Discord, similar to the Student Life one you can join, it is a platform where students can connect with one another and get updates on what is happening around the IU community. There have been a lot of changes happening on the App, Instagram, Discord, and even the Dome Digest so students should be sure to check them out consistently.
Source: Immaculata University
At the beginning, a lot of contingency plans were created for “what-if” scenarios, such as if our programming were going to be in person, virtual, hybrid or anywhere in between. There were plenty of plans made that never came to fruition, but thankfully, some of these ideas were recycled in other ways for future programs.
A lot of this has been a learning experience over the past six months. In considering what may be changed, are some of the Social Media posts on the Student Life Instagram over the summer. If these were changed, however, I’d never get to the level of knowledge I have now about the platform without some trial and error. I would say learning the nuances of using social media and making connections is important, both among students as well as between our office and the student body. Social media is a great tool to make those connections but there’s more to it than just creating a post and calling it a day; there are other factors to consider when creating virtual programs. Much of the summer was filled learning this, and now that we are in the fall semester, the landscape of programming shifts again with classes happening throughout the week. Having to create a plethora of programming in a virtual environment is not a challenge I expected to face coming into 2020, though these experiences have given me a lot of knowledge about various social media platforms I never used in the past. Even as the IU community returns to campus, these are skills that can be applied to programming in the future. Through the continued feedback from the IU community, like we had over the summer, I believe we can continue to evolve the nature of our programming to suit the times we are living in.
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