By Ansley Keane ’23
Staff Writer
The majority of Mount Holyoke students are living off campus this academic year, including first-years and transfer students who have yet to experience Mount Holyoke in person. Methods of finding community have evolved and look radically different from years past. Despite the online format, many Mount Holyoke clubs and organizations are still up and running. The Virtual Involvement Fair was held on Sunday, Sept. 6, which provided organization leaders and students an opportunity to understand what their Mount Holyoke cocurricular experience might look like this year.
Unlike the traditional Involvement Fair held every September on Skinner Green, this year’s Virtual Involvement Fair was held on Embark, an online platform Mount Holyoke is using to centralize community involvement at the College. Students could talk to organizations via one-on-one message and group chat options on each organization’s Involvement Fair page. Most organizations also had virtual booths in which students could enter a Zoom meeting with representatives from the organization, ask questions and get an understanding of what the organization will feel like this year. Haya Diwan ’21 and Khanh Ngo ’22, presidents of the Mount Holyoke Computer Science Society, noted in a collaborative statement that CSS managed to interact with a few students, but that “in a normal year we could always physically grab people to our booth to pitch them about our organization, which is impossible this year.” Diwan and Ngo also mentioned that it was “quite sad.”
This year’s Involvement Fair relied on students to seek out information about the organizations they were interested in rather than wandering around from booth to booth, stumbling across different groups. Emily Gitlin ’22 is the co-chair of HackHolyoke, an annual student-run hackathon. HackHolyoke shared a booth with CSS. When asked about the turnout at the Involvement Fair, Gitlin said it was “way, way lower than a normal year.”
“In the past we were able to draw some serious interest in HackHolyoke during the Involvement Fair,” Gitlin added. “This year, that was much more difficult.”
On the other hand, Sonali Sikder ’22, co-chair of Taal, a Bollywood fusion dance group, found that the Virtual Involvement Fair “was useful, especially for recruiting first-years.” Turnout was low for all other class years, Sikder said.
Jess Moskowitz ’22, committee chair of the Mount Holyoke Outing Club, thought the virtual fair went well. “We had a few new students stop by our live video call; that was really fun to get to talk to new people and hear new members be excited about joining the club,” Moskowitz said.
Len Yeomans ’22, president of Knit Happens, also shared that Knit Happens “certainly did not have as many people come up to the booth to talk us as we normally would, but we got to chat with a lot of interested people and almost all of them ended up coming to our first post-Involvement Fair meeting.”
Some clubs and organizations are also considering the fact that new students have not yet had the opportunity to meet their peers in person and must come up with new ways to do that virtually. According to Ngo and Diwan, “CSS particularly cares about first-years, especially now that they are beginning their time at Mount Holyoke remotely. We are designing and launching a special buddy system which aims to pair upperclassmen with underclassmen (first-years and sophomores) so that they can stay connected.”
The dance group Taal is normally audition-only, but this year is “trying to engage first-years in all our online events,” Sikder said. “We’re trying to emphasize that these events are open to everyone, regardless of previous dance experience,” Sikder noted.
Gitlin shared that HackHolyoke is attempting to reach first-years by “reaching out to professors of intro computer science classes and asking them to share info about our event with their students.”
Moskowitz has been thinking about how to help new students connect with others while they are apart from each other. Moskowitz said that “I was a new transfer student last year and getting involved with the Outing Club and going on trips was a great way that I got to know new people.” The Outing Club is considering a few strategies for engaging with new students, including a Big/Little program or a pen pal project.
Yeomans shared that “to accommodate the first-years, we actually asked a large portion of Knit Happens members to change Zoom links, so that newcomers would not feel intimidated or left out in such a large and close-knit group of people.” Yeomans noted that “over the summer, Knit Happens continued to have Zoom meetings [and] the majority of the members of these meetings (at least 12 of the 20 semi-consistent Zoomers) were members of the class of 2020 and 2019. So as the semester started we asked our alums to have their own separate meetings, for at least the first couple of weeks to help the new members feel comfortable and part of the club.”
Switching to remote operations after only running in-person meetings and events has presented some challenges to Mount Holyoke’s clubs and organizations. Not only have time zones become an issue, but some organizations, such as CSS, are finding it challenging to keep people motivated. However, an online format encourages the leaders of cocurricular activities to think creatively and come up with new ways of engaging their members and creating a community within their group.
Taal, which is usually performance-based, is facing the difficulty of not being able to be on stage. The org is pivoting instead to engage members of the community through other programs such as online workshops. “Hopefully more people will audition when we are back on campus,” Sikder said.
HackHolyoke also faces the challenge of creating community during events that have historically been face to face. “Social interaction would normally be a natural part of the event,” GItlin said. Now, “we need to take active steps to create a space where that can happen.” HackHolyoke is also dealing with the changes to their event that result from being unable to use certain hardware and offer certain workshops they have offered in previous years. However, Gitlin shared that “there are also a lot of surprising upsides” to holding the event virtually. Attendees no longer have to travel to participate in the hackathon, meaning HackHolyoke has become more accessible in certain ways this year, and the HackHolyoke leadership team does “not have to worry about the logistical challenge that is hosting, feeding and ensuring the safety of 200+ college students inside of Chapin,” according to Gitlin.
For the Outing Club, being remote means completely redesigning the format of the club, as the organization cannot run trips right now. This semester, Outing Club is “focusing more on creating a club-wide community so that members feel more a part of an outdoor culture beyond one trip or event,” Moskowitz said. The Outing Club is acting on that goal by creating new avenues for members to connect with each other, including “a variation of a Flat Stanley Project (Flat Mary Lyon) as a way of connecting members with each other,” said Moskowitz.
The Flat Mary Lyon project involves members of Outing Club receiving a paper Mary Lyon in the mail, bringing it to their favorite outdoor spot and sending it to another member of MHOC. Moskowitz shared that being completely online is “forcing Outing Club to revisit the core of who we are and who we want to be as an outing club.” While Outing Club has traditionally focused on organizing trips for students to spend time outdoors with their peers, the shift to a remote setup has opened up the door for other possibilities, such as an increased focus on outdoor education and “getting to know each other through virtual events,” Moskowitz said.
“Knit Happens is in a very unique position compared to a lot of orgs I think because the majority of what we do is just sit around and chat,” Yeomans said. Yeomans shared that moving digitally was relatively easy for the club.
“We just switched out the physical destination for the Zoom link, and it was nearly the same as being back to normal,” Yeomans said. That being said, Knit Happens still faced hurdles as a result of the switch to an online format. “We do not have access to our supplies. Normally during the year, we can rent out needles and yarn to beginners, but since all of that is locked up on campus, we are unable to give supplies to beginners,” Yeomans said. Like other organizations, Knit Happens is thinking creatively to create a sense of community within the club. “We have started a discord which allows us to connect more outside of meetings,” Yeomans said. Another potential benefit of holding Knit Happens online is that it may be easier to add activities, like watching movies as a group.
While clubs and organizations are at the forefront of creating community for Mount Holyoke students, the Student Experience Emergency Response Team has also been thinking about how to translate the on-campus community to a remote format. Jane Kvederas ’22 and Lasya Priya Rao ’23, student members of ERT, both shared that they are focused on creating programming that students will want to take part in.
According to Rao, a big challenge for the ERT is figuring out how to offer engaging programming for students while also “recognizing Zoom fatigue” and “making sure students aren’t overwhelmed.” Both Kvederas and Rao noted that a benefit to creating a virtual community is the increased opportunities for collaboration and for alumnae to become involved. Kvederas also noted that the Student Experience ERT has also made an effort to have “more deliberate programming geared towards first-years” to make them feel welcomed.
While current life as a Mount Holyoke student looks like nothing it has before, student leaders have continued their work to keep the sense of community alive and keep students engaged and connected, no matter where they are in the world.