Boring Behrend?

Anyone that is a student at Behrend will tell you without any hesitation that it is incredibly boring here on the weekends. A lot of factors can play into this problem. One large factor is that the majority of the student body goes back home on the weekends. 

Being a girl from New York City, I was so surprised to see how many people here reside from Erie or any town surrounding it. When icebreakers are done in classes at the beginning of the semester, one of the professor’s favorite questions is, “Where is everyone from?” The conversation usually goes like this:

“Raise your hand if you are from Erie.” More than half of the class raises their hands. 

“Now raise your hand if you are from Pittsburgh.” The rest of the class raises their hand. 

It’s not a bad thing to want to go home for the weekend to maybe catch up with parents or more importantly, to get your laundry done for free. However, it leaves the campus looking quite similar to a ghost town on a Friday night. In all honesty, if I lived close to home, I would probably want to go home for a weekend to enjoy a much deserved homemade meal after a week of Dobbins food. 

Another factor that can play into the dullness of this campus is the way events are advertised. I remember going to see a comedian in Bruno’s last semester who was actually pretty good. Sitting there with a few of my friends, I was amongst a whopping seven other people. Some had wandered in and left, some were on the other side engaging in conversation with their friends while eating. I have to say that this amazing number of people in attendance was doing great things for the comedian’s self esteem, and I say that with every bit of sarcasm. Throughout the skit, he joked about how little students there were and then commented about how his show was not advertised all throughout campus. 

“They gave me a tour and as I’m walking around, I notice there are no flyers advertising my performance and getting the word out. So, I was guessing that people already knew about me,” the comedian said. 

With the handful of students in the audience and tumbleweeds quietly floating around the empty campus as evidence, he was wrong. He made a very valid point though. If you don’t spend the majority of your time in the Reed Building, you may be missing out on flyers promoting events, shows, and functions. Why not have advertisements in dorms? Or in Dobbins, where hundreds of students are served daily. Let’s have weekly newsletters that lay out events happening in the next week or so that will be placed in the newsstands in dorm lobbies. There is an email that is sent out every couple of weeks or so explaining the events that will happen, but speaking from a student’s perspective, it doesn’t grab our attention if it isn’t an email pertaining to class or work. Let’s keep the fun activities that we had in the beginning of the fall semester for orientation week all throughout the year. 

We need to give students a fun reason to stay on campus on the weekends instead of going home and making fish tanks for goldfish that all died about a week later isn’t really going to cut it.