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| Amy Waterhouse Research Director seeresearch@umd.edu |
What most people do not realize about an organization as large as SEE is that there are so many different pieces that must work together to successfully put on events for the campus. As of last year, all proposals made by our programming directors (Cinema, Comedy, Concerts, Lectures, Musical Arts, Performing Arts and Special Events) had to include some form of relevant research to show that students were interested in or were seeking out the event being proposed. This means that if SEE directors wanted to consider having an event on campus, there must first be the student demand for said program to guarantee students would attend and enjoy the event.
How is this possible? That’s where research comes in!
As the Research Director, it is my job to:
1) Work with the programming directors to see if an event is desired by students and would be a good fit on campus
2) Discover from students what they want to see on campus and share the results with the Executive Board
In this sense, my job is both proactive and reactive. On the reactive side, I help SEE’s programming directors look into different artists, comedians, lecturers, etc. and survey students to see the demand on campus so programmers can make decisions about what events to propose. In addition, information that I help SEE’s programming directors find include anything from average ticket cost, number of shows per tour, where the performer or artist has performed before, or average audience size.
But the proactive side is where it gets interesting. For this side of my job, I get to reach out to the student body, usually through online or paper surveys. This side goes beyond merely what students want to see on campus. It also allows us to see things such as, which demographics we’re appealing to, what days and times are best to plan events, and how much students are willing to pay for tickets.
Last year during our biggest survey of the semester, the Art Attack Day Events survey, I collected and input over 1,200 paper surveys. We received lots of interesting feedback on a range of different topics, from what kind of giveaways students love best to who to bring to the fall concert. The SEE Executive Board was very excited to see what information the survey would provide us for the upcoming year.
But when I was browsing through the demographics section, I realized that the results were overwhelmingly female; over 70 percent! I filtered the survey to see what answers male students had put and the results were completely different. This discovery came as a huge surprise for me; from my experience, surveys are one of the simplest, most effective ways to find the likes and dislikes of a group. But with such a skewed perspective, I knew that in order for the results to be entirely unbiased, I would have to view them as two separate surveys.
This had never happened to me as Research Director before, and it definitely opened my eyes to the importance of appealing to different demographics on a campus as rich and diverse as ours. UMD is a campus of over 36,000 students, each with varying interests and opinions. It is our job as the programming board on campus to work to appeal to all of them! So when you see future surveys from us, please take the time to fill them out, no matter who you are. You can influence the events we bring to campus and I cannot emphasize enough that we want to bring events that YOU want to SEE on this campus.
