Jacob Schutz | Creating a more useful calendar

This last week, I read about 30 e-mails about events occurring on campus, received a dozen or so Facebook messages and had countless awkward confrontations on Locust Walk.

Then there was the PennPortal calendar of events, the Fisher-Hassenfeld (where I'm a Residential Adviser) Web site of House events and SPEC's combination of posters and e-mails.

Unable to process half of the information, I mentally curled into the fetal position and hoped one of my friends would know what was happening when a night of leisure rolled around.

I'm not upset about the cacophony of voices calling me to their events. Indeed, it's one of the reasons I came to Penn in the first place. The bewildering combination of concerts, speeches and film screenings is as exciting as it is intimidating.

But with the constant noise from campus organizations, it's nearly impossible to remember what's happening where and when. I begin each week with a declaration not to miss any event - and then spend Sunday reflecting on why I didn't see that speaker or attend that free concert.

Penn could, and should, do more to help students navigate the clusterfuck of competing events on and around campus.

And no, the calendar on the PennPortal site does not count as organizing campus events. It belongs in history books as an example of what people a decade ago thought the Internet would be like. Honestly, the calendar is a chaotic schedule with repetitive entries for unintelligible things such as "Renal Sections" and "SOPHOMORE PROCLAMATIONS OF FRESHMAN RULES." Events like these blanket the calendar while others by such popular organizations as Hillel or SPEC go unmentioned.

Despite meager efforts, there's no organization on the meta-level. For those willing to wade through the indecipherable layout of PennPortal, one can find a tool that is supposed to organize the calendar by type of event - film, religious, academic, etc. Yet according to this archaic listing system used for events, there were zero international or religious events for the entire month of October.

Student groups are left to fend for themselves. Engineering junior Galina Grigoriev is treasurer for Amnesty International, which hosted human-rights activist Kimmie Weeks last Monday.

Grigoriev said that the organization uses Facebook groups, listservs, posters and flyering to advertise events. Regarding the last option, so infamous on Locust Walk, she told me, "For the amount of work that goes into it, it's not well-correlated to the amount of people who show up." She said most attendees are already members or on the listserv, allowing little room for reaching out during special events.

Penn can't abrogate its responsibility to help students connect with the wealth of opportunities that speak to them. Disorganization is a familiar theme for a campus as bureaucratically challenged as Penn, but in this case a solution would be easy to implement and would pay enormous dividends.

Columbia University, for instance, has a student calendar that actually organizes disparate events into workable categories. With two clicks of my mouse, I was able to search for events listed as "Arts: Film" occurring in the next week, with four relevant listings laid out instantaneously.

I described this kind of model to College freshman Robert Fink. He excitedly asked: "Is that what the PennPortal calendar is?" I sadly shook my head "No."

He continued, "If that did exist, it'd be really helpful."

Our University should undertake an effort to join the 21st century. Implementing an accessible calendar that displays events from campus groups, academic departments and College Houses would go a long way in decomplicating our already busy lives. It is something the Office of Student Life seems ideal for handling (whose Web site now, by the way, has an even more empty calendar than the PennPortal one).

Extracurricular events are one of the principle attractions of a school as prestigious as Penn. The University must spend an equal amount of time advertising them to current students as they do to prospective ones.

Jacob Schutz is a College junior from Monument, Colo. His email is schutz@dailypennsylvanian.com. The MacGuffin appears every Monday.

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