Involvement fair to feature 350 organizations

The annual fall involvement fair will feature approximately 350 student and university run organizations. It will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 5 from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Field House.

Kristen Carr, coordinator of Student Involvement Programs, said, “One reason [we hold the fair] is to allow students a chance to get face-to-face time with programs and program leaders.” She added that the fair is also a chance for students in organizations to further develop leadership skills and provide all students a chance to meet new people and possibly make new friends.

Last year, around 5,000 students attended the fair, and Student Involvement Programs, a division of Student Affairs, expects similar numbers this year.

About 380 organizations applied to be in the involvement fair over the summer. Student Involvement Programs looked at how active the organizations were and their status with the University to determine the final 350.

At the fair, each organization will have half a table to showcase themselves; no performance will occur. Maps will be available to help students locate the organizations they are interested in. As the fair will represent only around half of the organizations on campus, information for UContact will be available for students looking for organizations that are not at the fair.

UContact, uconntact.uconn.edu, is a website where student organizations can register and put up pages with ways to contact leadership and up-to-date information on the organizations’ happenings. The website went up last year and has approximately 600 organizations on it. In addition, UContact acts as a place for organizations to post about upcoming events. For example, the home page features a virtual bulletin board that rotates through various organizations’ flyers. Underneath that, news reports posted by different organizations cycle through.

A list of organizations attending this year’s fair was not yet available from Student Involvement.