Students voted in favour of a centralized digital event calendar during the WUSA annual general meeting on March 27.
The idea was spearheaded by Justin Gu, a third year computer science student, and Emma Lee, a recently-elected WUSA director, who highlighted the importance of events as a way for students to meet and engage with others.
“Right now we’re having a pretty big problem with student atomization,” Lee said at the WUSA meeting. “The bubble of students we’re interacting with just gets smaller and smaller because we have no place to go and interact and socialize and it’s difficult for us to find those people, those spaces.”
The solution they propose in their motion is to introduce a centralized digital space for students to publish club events. For the past three months, Gu, Lee, and current WUSA director Tham Sivakumaran collaborated with eight clubs to publish their events in a digital space developed by UW students.
The calendar would also theoretically include a search function, allowing the user to find upcoming events they want to attend based on their individual preferences. This includes ideas for filters and tags that would allow students to search for paid versus free, on-campus versus off-campus, academic versus social, and more. The calendar aims to tackle accessibility issues that prevent students from missing events they may have been interested in attending.
Club events at UW allow for students to break away from the grind and to find people in their community to engage with. Students with different interests, majors, and faculties congregate together at events, giving them the space to socialize and have positive experiences with others outside of their classrooms and homes. “My hope is that one day we can live in a livelier campus where students can connect with their people and find their spaces outside their homes and classrooms, and students can effortlessly see all their campus events in one place,” Gu said.
WUSA’s approval of the project will allow for further development of the website in the near future. The platform is currently in its early-access stage and can be found at https://uwclubs.com/.
