Melanie DePriester
Staff Writer
I am not a fan of this new convocation system. What used to be an occasional, yet meaningful event has now turned into a frequently mandatory lecture that could have truly been an email.
Convocation had more impact when there was actually something of importance to announce, such as Southern Takeover. Now that a convocation is going to be held every month, I think they are going to run out of ideas rather quickly and then end up reusing old ones that are not necessary.
While I think the October convocation’s mental health concept was a decent idea, I don’t think it was executed properly. Jenkins Field House simply does not have the capacity for that many students to be walking around and interacting with booths. That set-up might work fine for Blast-Off, but the entire student body isn’t all there at the same time. By the time you got in the building after waiting through a long line in the heat, you could check in and then immediately walk back out, making the entire event pointless.
“I didn’t like it in Jenkins, nothing happened. I just walked around and then left,” Ryan Mitchinson, a business administration major, said.
At least when it was in Branscomb, you would not be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people and could actually hear the speakers. The only thing that could possibly improve Convocation would be to bring down the number of times it happens and include more student participation.
“I feel like it’s a lot of fun whenever they have students participate in games and stuff on stage,” Jeremiah Gartner, a sports management major, said. “Structuring the event to be more fun might get more people to want to show up.”
The only thing entertaining about the first Convocation was the screenshots I was receiving from Yik Yak about the entire event.
It is still early in the year, so maybe as more Convocations happen, they will start to have more substance and a greater purpose. But as of now, both events were considered a failure in my book, and I think they should just revert back to the way it used to be.
