At the beginning of every semester, Cal State Long Beach holds a two-day event known as Week of Welcome where the school’s clubs and student organizations pitch tents and try to attract new students to join.
It’s always a bustling and boisterous occasion with food, music and games. This year, however, the bi-annual event is significantly quieter, the only rush coming from the flurry of fingers clicking and clacking on keyboards. Week of Welcome went virtual this week and it’s been an adjustment; for everyone.
Now that CSULB classes are online-only and nearly all in-person gatherings are banned, both students and faculty involved with Associated Students Inc.—the campus’s student government—were left with the daunting task of recreating the Week of Welcome experience online. Their answer? An app.
“We did a lot of research, trying to figure out what other schools were doing, and well, they just weren’t,” said 27-year-old Beach Pride Events coordinator Sabrina Ware. “Basically, we’re kind of spearheading this, using a conference app to host live sessions for every group.”
The Week of Welcome app is designed for both mobile and desktop devices that anyone with a CSULB email and internet connection can access.
“Connection and accessibility were our main focuses,” said Ware. “That was really important to us.”
What was formerly a bustling, borderline chaotic two-day event, has been fanned out over five days and organized categorically. Each of the 218 student organizations participating in the event this year are designated a day and time throughout the week, based on their club’s characteristics, where students can tune in, live on Zoom, to find out more about the club, its offerings and chat with fellow members. This Friday, for example, is spaced for the religious and cultural organizations.
Leanne Meyers, 21, is the lead programming student for Beach Pride Events and led the charge on organizing the scheduling. She noted that a bright side to taking a virtual route was that the process of finding and signing up for clubs is much simpler and straightforward, as it can all be done instantaneously on the app.
“In the past when things were in-person, if you were looking for a specific club, looking for their table could be very overwhelming because there’s so much going on,” she said.
The hundreds of clubs and student organizations rely on Week of Welcome to attract new members. That was part of why ASI wanted to make sure the event could carry on virtually. But with no indication as to when in-person gatherings can resume on campus, the clubs are having to figure out just how to carry on through the semester, or if it’s even worth doing so.
“I think the groups are stressed a little bit…I know, for example, that’s really affecting the Greek community because their numbers are so large and there’s housing and things like that,” Ware said. “They’re really trying to navigate how to continue with their clubs’ registrations and transferring of offices from one year to the next.”
Since Cal State Long Beach is a commuter school with nearly 33,000 undergraduate students, Week of Welcome can be an important event in helping students feel more connected to their campus. Even if students never signed up for a club, they were immersed in a visceral experience, new faces, the chatter, the commotion of it all. It was a piece of the college experience, something returning students feel the loss of and that freshman can, as of now, only imagine.
“It’s been a really weird adjustment and obviously no one was expecting it. It’s been tough,” said Meyers, who will be leaving CSULB with a degree in communications at the end of the semester. She also mentioned that she still doesn’t know when she’s going to be able to experience her graduation commencement.
“I’m still trying my best to find ways to stay connected with people. It’s hard to make friends [now]. In person, it was really easy to just kind of meet someone in your class and like get their number to share notes and then you become friends.”
One of ASI’s answer to this is Speed Friending, which is exactly what it sounds like: similar to speed dating, students can interact with each other one-on-one and chat for a few minutes and exchange phone numbers if the like before moving on to the next person. They accomplish this using the breakout room feature on Zoom.
They’ve also re-initiated their Poetry Lounge, which serves as more of a virtual open mic night—where people can sing, play an instrument, dance or do just about anything else.
“We did that over Zoom to kind of still create that inclusive environment where people don’t feel pressured to share in front of like a really large group and it’s really overwhelming,” Meyers said.
The other focus of ASI’s efforts is by creating live virtual entertainment, activities that are fun, unique and will hopefully give students something to look forward to through the semester.
Local DJ B-Rokk, a CSULB alum who worked in various departments in ASI before graduating, held a live-streamed concert for students on Wednesday—a popular event, Meyers said, because students can talk with the Zoom chat function and also use virtual backgrounds that “add to the experience.”
To end the Week of Welcome event on a high note, will be Drag Bingo hosted by Monique Heart, from Ru Paul’s Drag Race season 10.
Drag Bingo, prior to COVID-19, had always been held in-person and featured Long Beach drag performers, often from Hamburger Mary’s. In this virtual version, students will play using a digital bingo card on the Week of Welcome app while Heart hosts the game in her “fun and performative way,” ending the hour and a half long event with a live performance.
“We had to turn around and come up with all new ideas, teach ourselves how to use these virtual softwares and platforms and our office as a whole did a really great job turning everything around so quickly and being so creative,” Meyers said. “We still wanted to create that college experience.”