There are many reasons why Georgetown Qatar students don’t attend events–being lazy is not one of them.
GU-Q students should be familiar with the daily campus cycle by now: you show up, attend classes, have a lunch break, attend a few more classes, and then wrap up your academic day. The (un)lucky among us may have a seminar to attend that keeps us on campus well into the night, however, most people will be done by 5:15 PM at the latest. Yet from 8:30 AM (for the truly unlucky) to 5:15 PM and beyond, we are never not busy. Assignments upon assignments, exams upon exams; the workload never falters. So when 1 PM rolls around and the time for both lunch and events comes along with it, the choice between the two is easy to make. GU-Q students aren’t lazy—we’re exhausted.
One may bring up the valid point that events often serve lunch to their attendees, yet it is important to recognize that attending an event is still an expenditure of social energy. If you’re an exhausted university student and want to spend your lunch break unwinding, what would you rather do: sit in a classroom and listen to a speaker talk about something, or sit down in the atrium with your friends and feel the collective catharsis that comes with complaining about your exhaustion?
“We Are a Lazy Campus” identifies a symptom in the GU-Q student body but misdiagnoses it. The article lays blame on the student body for being unengaged with campus events and chalks it up to a profound laziness within the students. It brings to light the environment of apathy here at GU-Q. However, it does not delve deeper into the reasons that allowed that apathy to fester. Students across the board, from the every-day attendees to the community organizers at the forefront of event planning, are not enthusiastic—but why?
For one, community organizers face difficulty even obtaining the funding they need for events. The 182,000 QAR of unused Student Activities Commission (SAC) funding the article mentions is not solely a result of club leaders simply choosing not to obtain funding. Rather, it is due to the thick bureaucracy that comes with obtaining that funding in the first place. Community organizers have to appeal to the SAC committee in order to obtain funding and work with Events to raise a ticket and find an appropriate date, time, and facility to host their event, which is an arduous process that often leaves community organizers dissatisfied and angered. This, in reality, is the origin of the apathy the article speaks of. We must not forget that community organizers are students too, with their own set of classwork to keep up with. Community organizers are not lazy. They simply see an exhausting and aggravating process in front of them and choose to preserve their peace.
I spoke to Noon Elsharif, a former community organizer, who said, “I don’t think it's just laziness, I think that community organizers are just really tired, and the process of organizing an event is too difficult. On top of the heavy workload of GU-Q’s courses, some students have on-campus jobs, so being active community organizers is almost impossible for them. Also, I don't know man, attending mandatory 4-hour training sessions seems unencouraging as well.”
As for the student body, there is a similar external factor that could be causing the event “laziness” the article speaks of—the lack of engaging events in the first place. Due to the apathy among community organizers thanks to the difficult events process, less student-led events are hosted at all. This results in a majority of events being hosted by staff and faculty, which, while interesting in their own right, don’t resonate with the student body as much as student-led events do. It is an unfortunate truth, however by virtue of the events being faculty or staff-led instead of student-led, they become less interesting to students and therefore less likely to attract attendees. It’s an issue of relatability rather than strictly one of content.
To point fingers at the student body and call us “lazy” is an unfair assessment. I do not refute the claim that students do not attend events: I can speak personally and say I don’t attend many of the on-campus events. However, further analysis is needed to pinpoint why events see so little attendance and why so much SAC funding goes unused. I commend the article’s anonymous author for bringing this issue to light—it’s an important discussion to be had and I’m glad that a platform like this can be used to voice our opinions on it. However, I must disagree with their conclusion. We are not a lazy campus, we are an unengaged and exhausted one.
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