Your Voice | Getting you involved

In yesterday’s edition of The Daily Pennsylvanian, the DP provided campus with suggestions on how the Social Planning and Events Committee should incorporate student input into what artists, speakers and events are brought to campus.

The suggestions they provided are really good. So good, in fact, that they are already in place.

As most of you know, SPEC is the only branch of Penn’s student government that does not require any interviews, applications or elections to join. All you need to do is sign up via the G.O. Penn system and show up to the committee’s next meeting. Each of our nine committees spends quite a bit of time brainstorming and bouncing ideas among its members each semester, and this is a great way to have your voice heard.

Also, in order to gauge student input beyond the committee, we send out end-of-the-year and mid-year surveys where we gather information on what genres of music students want on campus and even who they want to see perform. The data is then analyzed and each committee uses it in their decision making process.

Finally, we maintain robust Facebook, Twitter and website accounts where anyone can give us feedback on how we are doing. We then take all of these suggestions into account when deciding who should come to campus.

That being said, we know the process is not perfect, and we are already trying to figure out better ways to gather input from the campus community to ensure that the artists we bring are the artists you want to see. Additionally, weighing what constitutes Penn’s values is something we take very seriously, and we want to hear what you think are the best ways of going about formalizing them.

Send me an email at spec@specevents.net, fill out our end-of-the-year survey and sign-up for one of our committees to have your voice heard.

See you out in the Quad and at the concert this weekend!

Josh Oppenheimer is a senior in the College and SPEC president. He can be reached at spec@specevents.net.

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