It is safe to say most students are experiencing a communication and interaction barrier between each other due to COVID-19 restrictions and online learning. Club and organizations are working to find new ways to not only interact with students in the clubs, but to allow students to meet new people and engage with each other while staying physically distant.
A new way the Center for Student Involvement along with Student Senate have developed is creating a Discord server. The idea to create the server came up about a year ago when the college had first moved online. Clubs and organizations across campus were struggling to get students to be involved with online events.
“Last semester or rather spring 2020, we weren’t getting a lot of traffic to a lot of our online events and so we were trying to find a new way to reach students so they would actually get the message,” Chris Quinn, student life ambassador, said. “We had stuff going on and had to find different ways to get students to be interested and also find different ways to run events. So, the Discord sort of served as a nice way to meet all of those goals, so it was a way to actually interact with students in a viable way where they could talk to one another.”
The Student Life Discord server allows a student to learn about different organizations and clubs as well as talk with students who are interested in the same things and the best part about it is, it’s all in one place.
“The Discord serves as a way to facilitate interaction between students,” Quinn said. “It really sets up a place where students can interact depending on what their interests are. It has several subsections, so if they want to do stuff related to Student Senate, they can go there and into the Ask Questions channel and the About us channel if they want to do things related to student life.”
Sailor Usher, Student Senate president, has been working to get others signed up for the Discord server so it can work to its fullest potentional.
“I just invited all my friends first and then I went through the list of different clubs and orgs on get involved and if they had a Discord link, I would join it,” Usher said.
Usher has learned several things about Discord through the Animation Guild club at the college and has been able to use those insights to help create the CSI server.
“The Animation Guild has been really awesome and now I am an honorary officer there,” Usher said. “I took some of the work they had done and how they set up their Discord and kind of used it as part of the CSI Discord.”
Student Life has also hosted several tournaments with games such as Mario Kart and Among US through the Discord server.
If you are interested in joining the Student Life Discord server, click here.
By Gracyn Shulista