While DePauw students are reputed to hold a strong sense of community, student government hopes to continue strengthening and improving campus life.
At the student government meeting Sunday evening the student representatives brainstormed ideas to encourage greater school spirit at sporting events. The group also discussed strategies for improving integration between international and domestic students.
The representatives broke up into three groups to discuss why students don't attend sporting events and brainstormed ways to promote the games to get a higher attendance rate.
One major cause of the lack of attendance at school events that the student representatives pinpointed was student's limited amount of free time and lack of awareness of the events.
"I don't want to accept that everyone is too busy to support our athletes," junior representative Jonathan Rosario said. "I think we should target those people. We need to learn how to reach students who have the time to go to sporting events."
Sophomore representative Kristen Fairchild said she believes student schedules prevent fans from attending games.
"Students don't have the time commitment to attend games, and they also don't have the incentive to go," Fairchild said.
Other student representatives do not believe that a lack of promotion for events is a cause of low student attendance.
"Campus is doing a good job of promoting games with posters and DePauw Fridays where students dress up and win a prize," senior representative Katelyn Hayes said.
The student representatives came up with various ways to promote school spirit at the conclusion of the meeting. Their ideas include increased advertising through social media, planning entertainment during half time, providing giveawayws or free food and planning more carefully around potential calendar conflicts in the future.
The other primary focus of the meeting was how to better integrate domestic and international students. The representatives discussed how to help with the transition to DePauw during the beginning of the year between not only international students, but also all other students who are on campus early.
Many representatives talked about bringing the DePauw community together during this week where international students along with athletes, mentors, and various other students are on campus. The representatives want to host more social events during this week to bring the different communities together on campus.
Student government plans to pursue this issue in hopes of better bringing all students together during orientation as a single community.