The word “brainstorm” has been thrown around the ACT department quite a bit in the past week, though it feels like we’re only just learning exactly what this mystical thing is meant to be. The SE Website has been helpful in this regard; that lightning-adorned Brain Storm banner is the first notable bit of advertising we’ve seen, aside from the posters that have been put up. But when have students around here ever looked at posters?
Apparently, Brain Storm is a “Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities Week” put on by the School of Arts and Sciences, or at least that is what it says on the official schedule of events.
Also, it started on Monday, according to said schedule.
Brain Storm definitely has a great deal of potential and the events sound as though they held interest for both students and faculty. However, there appears to have been a fatal flaw in the execution of this event.
Where on earth was the publicity? A full week of theatre performances, musical performances, faculty lectures and student presentations sounds like a big deal. In fact, it sounds like a very big deal. Why wasn’t it treated like one?
Perhaps it was more of a conceptual thing that was suddenly pushed into becoming reality once someone realized that the end of the semester was nearing.
Anything involving “research” is generally, by nature, a well-planned, meticulous happening with plenty of time allotted for its completion. The sudden appearance of an event does not exactly facilitate this.
There is no time in the semester when throwing something together at the last minute and expecting it to be decent is a good idea; just ask any student who has had to write that critical essay right before the deadline. However, choosing to do this near the end of the semester makes the whole thing exponentially worse.
Right now, students are alternately panicking and trying to cram pertinent bits of knowledge into their brains. Professors are planning tests and metaphorically trying to stay afloat in the veritable floods of grading they have to get done.
It’s just not a good time for anything, let alone a last-minute celebration of the arts and sciences.
The students and faculty here at Southeastern have a lot of fantastic ideas and they really should have an opportunity to showcase them, but this opportunity needs careful planning and ample time to execute those ideas.
Brain Storm would likely have been better served by a semester-long campaign of advertising and exposition so that the people of SE could be familiar with its purpose and have a chance to contribute.
On that note, can we please ask that our existence at the paper be validated? Telling students about important events on campus is why we’re here, but without cooperation, all we can do is tell people what happened after the fact. While writing about it afterward is great, we love the opportunity to generate publicity for noteworthy events so that SE students can actually experience them firsthand.
A celebration of the creative activities that happen at SE is something that needs to be on the academic calendar and publicized so that everyone here knows what is going on. A banner on the SE homepage is a great step, but there really could have been a lot more done.
Making everyone more aware of Brain Storm early on would have allowed the participants to be more prepared and to put out higher quality projects (not that everyone here isn’t doing his or her very best already).
In conclusion, this is a great idea, but it feels as though it was poorly executed. This department has a lot to offer, and this week should have been something everyone was looking forward to rather than something only invoking curiosity after the fact.
– Brandi Bunch, Managing Editor