…because these days, I feel like I really don’t know.

I’m talking about campus events, by the way. Maybe it’s because I don’t live on campus, but this year, I find myself not knowing about events happening at Drury. For example, I guess the Student Union Board had some kind of fall festival all last week, but I didn’t hear any details about it, and when I did learn about it, the time had already passed. And that makes me sad because I probably missed out on some fun and free stuff (it’s free, it’s fun, it’s SUB–that’s the tagline, right?) I feel like I’m missing out on what other student organizations and departments are doing. So, what’s the deal?

Current students have noticed a change in campus life this year. We used to get emails–sometimes lots of emails at once–about student group meetings and campus events. A lot of people recognized them as the “get involved” emails. Throughout the past couple years I’ve been at Drury, I heard that most students didn’t like getting all these emails because it supposedly clogged up their inbox. So this year, the emails disappeared, and in came the Drury Calendar, also known as D. Cal. Now, student groups have been encouraged to submit and share their events and meetings on the calendar, with hopes that students will be regularly checking in to see what’s happening on campus instead of receiving emails.

While it seems that some organizations are submitting events onto D. Cal, some people–like me–still don’t know about it. I think students are still getting used to checking D. Cal, but I also think that some of these events need to be shared in other ways, like through Facebook and Twitter. I find that I tend to know more about events coming up on campus when they are shared through social networking sites. However, there’s also the matter of getting students to “like” the Facebook pages of organizations or to follow their Twitter accounts because that’s the only way they would receive updates. Then again, organizations would also have to assume that all students have Facebook or Twitter.

So here I am, still checking my Drury email religiously, as if all of a sudden the “get involved” emails will return. And yes, this is me admitting that I kind of miss those emails. Not only did I use those emails to figure out what was going on at Drury, but as a student reporter, I also used them as potential story ideas. For example, a couple weeks ago, we received emails about the Drury presidential candidates being on campus. These emails successfully prompted me to attend the forums that were held with the candidates, and I wrote a blog post about it.

After all of this, if you’re wondering why this is important it’s because students needs to feel connected and engaged on campus. One way to achieve that is when students participate in events. They can’t do that or they won’t do it if they don’t know about what’s going on at Drury.

I think that’s enough of my opinion. I actually would like to hear from other people on what they think. I want to hear from students–residential or commuter. Here are my questions for you:

How often do you check D. Cal?

As a student group or department, do you use D. Cal?

Do you agree with anything I just said? Why or why not?

And, as always, thank you for reading.