In an article earlier this year regarding the changes in the responsibilities of RAs, one of the RAs commented that there seems to be an oversaturation of events at Calvin College.

This opinion seems to be shared by many students on campus. I have heard many people comment — either directly or indirectly — that there is a lot going on. Weekends at Calvin consist, especially at the beginning of the year, of at least one weekend activity, multiple sports events and many other club activities.

For many students who want to get involved but still need to get homework done, this feels rather overwhelming. This overloading comes from the intention of providing activities for all types of people, which has unfortunately created many events that most students cannot keep up with.

Therefore, even students with special interests in certain activities have trouble finding out about them because there are so many activities going on.

Two prime examples of this oversaturation are student news and Cokes ‘n’ Clubs. Unfortunately, student news is set up to have organizations around campus email the server with what the event is and what is to be shown in the summary list. The event summary list in student news often fills the browser viewing screen.

If students find an event title in the summary list that interests them, they have to scroll through all of the other events listed just to find the one they want. Sometimes by this point the student gives up and deletes the email or ignores it.

The second example is Cokes ‘n’ Clubs. As a leader of a student organization, I am aware of the importance of this event. The intention of this event is to inform students of all the clubs on campus, but since there are so many (at least 30 clubs were present this year) it is easy for students to miss clubs that they would be interested in or to forget about a club they were interested in because of all the other clubs.

While having a variety of clubs is a good thing, I believe having all of them displayed at one time and in the same place is a bit overkill.

There have been other times when large events on campus conflict with each other. Administration has started to fix this by combining different campus organizations under a single leader.

In addition, an outlet is provided for student organizations to post events on a calendar where they can coordinate their events around other events. Despite this, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Some ways this issue can be fixed is promoting better coordination between campus events, student organizations and sports events.

Another major help would be to make student news more searchable by linking each event in the summary list to the corresponding paragraph so that students do not have to scroll through all of the events.

The final problem with oversaturation of campus-wide events is that specific dorm and floor events are often limited or ignored. Also, floor bonding can be harder to achieve when friends and fellow students are all going to different campus events.

This is an opinion piece and does not necessarily represent the views of Calvin Chimes, Calvin College or the Christian Reformed Church.