Jeff Lail

I was talking to @cleders on Twitter about the apathy represented by her students.  I told her that she inspired a blog post – I lied.  She actually inspired a series.

I want to dig in what goes into student engagement.  I think it’s a complex issue and there’s no easy answer to how to get students invested in their college experience.  However, I do think there are some questions we can consider when we don’t think students are as invested in our events and our institution as we think they should be.  I’m going to be looking into these in a series of posts.

First, I want to define apathy.  Apathy in my definition is disinterest or lack of interest in events planned by staff for students.  There could be a plethora of reasons that students don’t attend events, but a good staff programmer or student programmer thinks about why this might be happening and tries to do better.

Frankly, I think it’s easy to dismiss poor student attendance or interest as “students don’t care” when I think it’s more likely that students don’t care about your particular program.  It’s easy to throw your hands up in the air, but I hope that we, as staff who love our jobs and are committed to what we do, would be more interested in seeking out creative solutions to our problems.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to break down some questions I try to ask myself when I look at what student events to do and evaluate the events we have done.