The College of Lake County has a student outreach problem that hinders its ability to connect and communicate with students and others at a level that would make CLC feel like the community it is supposed to be.
During elections for student trustee and the SGA Executive Board, every candidate expressed a problem with communication at CLC. During their campaigning event, they received comments from students saying that the walls were empty and that they never really heard about the events happening at CLC until it was too late.
CLC relies too much on Café Willow or the C and B court to convey communication with students. When students pass by, they are met with flyers, a calendar, and at times tabling events hosted by people trying to reach them. However, if students are at any other part of the college, they don’t encounter promotional material beyond what the department has posted.
Most halls, especially on the second floors of the college, are barren walls of white stone. These walls are prime real estate for advertising, but they are underused. These spaces could be filled with promotional material for clubs and organizations, as well as postings to inform students about in-school job opportunities, scholarships, or classes that might interest them.
The administration seems more focused on attracting applicants to CLC instead of making sure current students feel part of the college. Most resources are spent on outreach and recruitment rather than uplifting enrolled students. It seems as if they just want you to come in and get out. The barren walls make the place look like a corporation, not a college trying to develop its community.
When you walk the halls of the college, it feels as if you’re making your way through an airport. There are so many locations where students sit and study next to blank walls. Look down the hall of second floor L building to T building or B building second floor going to A building or the whole second floor of A building walking toward the flag poles. Does it feel like a college, or does it feel like an office building?
The current SGA members have been trying to find new ways to communicate with students about clubs and events. Their Legacy Project to place three monitors around the college is a step in the right direction. But how effective will the monitors be on their own? As of now, the only things that are being pitched to display on these monitors are slides and flyers that will switch from one image to the other.
How long each image will be displayed and how many will be in rotation has not been determined. If they’re just going to be images on a screen that people have to read quickly before they rotate to the next image, how long will students have to wait to get one piece of information that could have just been a flyer on the wall or left on a table? Will the increased size of the flyers displayed on a screen make a difference? Maybe. It works for billboards, doesn’t it?
I hope that the monitors will be used for something like videos, even if they’re silent. What is the point of having these monitors that will cost an estimated $3,500 of student fees to just have images of a flyer that’s already posted near the walls where the monitors are already placed?
The location of the monitors is another issue. The locations that were chosen were picked because they were considered “high traffic areas.” This makes sense, but the problem is that these locations already have monitors that promote other events and information.
The monitor that’s being placed between the Welcome to One Stop Center and the Adviser Center is redundant. There’s already a monitor at the other end of the One Stop Center, which is also next to the SGA office. This would be a better spot for SGA to promote clubs and organizations. The Cafe Willow location has a spot to the right of entering the seating area of the cafe, but it only shows how much energy CLC is saving through its clean energy initiative. Why couldn’t the departments that have access to these monitors be contacted to cooperate with the students to market them?
SGA is genuinely trying to find more ways to spread the word and get access to different parts of the campus. However, the administration hasn’t been making it easy for them. The process of even getting information on how or the person to talk to feels as if you’re being given the runaround.
Students should have access to what’s going on and what CLC has to offer. Being able to promote programs and other student activities could connect students to what’s happening and increase participation at events. CLC is slowly gaining more students every semester, and it’s important that we make sure we can reach them. Filling these walls is one way we can do that.
