Low event attendence at Hudson Valley Community College raises questions
By: Kevin Conley II
Staff Writer
Hudson Valley Community College has experienced exceedingly low student attendance and involvement in the many different events and activities that the school has provided.
The Student Activities Department sets up events to give students time to treat themselves with activities such as monthly movies, free food, events and festivals that mean a lot to the campus, all in an effort to help students relax.
According to the members of Student Activities, the low rates of attendence have occured mainly because most events are not getting a lot of attention, and time management is negatively affecting students as many are involved with jobs outside of school.
Zion Sherin, president of the Student Senate and the Investment Club, said participation rates are decreasing for a variety of reasons.
“It definitely has to do with [the fact] that we’re at a community college.” Sherin said. “A lot of students have to commute here, and because of that we had to schedule all of our classes for a condensed four-hour period where all of our classes are back to back,” he continued. “When we are done, we go back home, we want to relax, take that time and then we don’t have the motivation to come back to school to be engaged in activities.”
Another conflict that has affected participatory rates at Hudson Valley Community College is that the Student Activities office is declining clubs due to lack of participation.
“[There] has recently had a decline in clubs that are listed [and] a part of that is because we had clubs in the past that have been further stored as clubs, but they haven’t had active involvement,” said Sherin. “So [Student Activities] listed it as a club on their website, but not actually participating,” he continued. “Last year, to help with budgets, we made sure that we reached out to some clubs, and we knew which ones were active and which ones weren’t, and the ones that weren’t, we removed from our club list because we shouldn’t be saying that we have a club that doesn’t exist.”
Many students have difficulty balancing schoolwork with campus activities, as well.
“People’s schoolwork definitely plays a role,” said Sherin. “There are two things, and neither of these are necessarily bad, but one of them is that a lot of our students that come to Hudson Valley also have a job, which really hurts student engagement,” he continued. “Another thing is that our school does have pretty great assistant learning programs, or the sort of programs where people come and they study either on the LAC, where they come for math help, or you could go in peer tutor,” Sherin said. “Students are more likely to attend either of those than events.”
Students can go to the Learning Activity Center on the lower level of the Marvin Library (LAC), to get help on math work, the Writing Research Center at the upper level of the Marvin Library, or find a tutor or a teacher based on the work they do, to find answers and learn what they need to pass their classes.
One way for the campus to remain in balance with the students’ academic success and the campus’ success is to have students be connected with the school website, including social media such as Snapchat and the Outlook app.
Students could also support the campus’ participation rates and involvement in clubs by applying to student activities through SnapChat.
Students who run the activities when they are live, pass down fliers with Snapchat stickers and usernames so other students will be notified on upcoming events being set up by the campus.
Hudson Valley’s social media accounts give students a clear opportunity to attend events, and potentially get a shout-out.
Hudson Valley isn’t only a place of hard work, it’s also a place for adults to experience the independence to explore what they find fun, and to discover individual interests.