On October 20, the Entertainment Committee (EC) hosted Fall Fest, reigniting large-scale events on campus. While they struggled during the pandemic to host virtual events for students, upcoming events are in the works to boost in-person activity.
During the pandemic, Zoom proved to be a challenging method of communication because of a lack of collaboration when organizing ideas. Despite these issues, EC was still able to plan virtual events for students, including interviews with celebrities and music groups. “The only components of those events were contracts for the performers which we worked on with student life, technical assistance with the webinar, advertising, and giveaways,” Garrett Horwath, Vice President of the EC, replied in an interview with The Stute, and continued, “it mostly took a lot of work and communication within our eboard and with the office of undergraduate student life for the performer contracts and talent agents.”
Although they wanted to create more activities through online platforms, they found that students felt exhausted by Zoom meetings. So, in order to support the students’ interests without violating pandemic-specific rules, invited Broadway performers, comedians, mainstream artists, and musicians to perform for students and have Q&A sessions. “We also temporarily lowered our membership requirements, while virtual, to be accomodating of the difficult circumstances presented during the pandemic,” Horwath continued.
When they returned to in-person learning this semester, EC had difficulty in membership numbers and preparing for events. “I think the reason we had a slow start to recruiting members to the planning committee was the flooding and storms at the beginning of the semester as well as a lot of last minute changes with the return to campus,” Horwath explained. Despite these hardships, EC has recently seen more new members that are helping to set up successful events with large attendance numbers.
As normality has returned on campus, EC’s e-board has been sketching out plans for future semesters. “We’ve already started on spring semester events and have even secured a Founders Day Ball location and are going through the offer/artist booking process for Techfest,” Horwath elaborated. While face masks are still in place for events, further precautions such as timeslot RSVPs, de-densifying the floor plan, requiring masks outside, etc., will be implemented if a large number of attendees is anticipated.
For the rest of this year, EC’s e-board and committee have set aims and objectives. One goal they hope to implement is the knowledge transfer from upperclassmen to underclassmen so that the club can operate smoothly after students graduate. Another goal they have is to restructure the e-board for e-board elections that will occur next year. “We’re looking to redistribute the work more evenly across the committee, particularly for our on campus events,” Horwath said. “Right now Fall Festival, Tree Lighting, Founders Day Ball, Earth Day and Techfest all fall under the Festivities Chairs (we’ve had co-chairs the past 3 years) and VP of On Campus Events.”
Students can contact the Entertainment Committee by emailing at entertainment@stevens.edu.
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