Ask the experts: Why don't some students participate in school activities?

By Kaeshon King | Columnist

There are many amazing things that happen on our beautiful campus of Augusta University.

This semester has been lively and it feels like a true university for the first time since COVID-19 started in 2020. Even with the campus feeling like a university again, there are many students who simply don’t participate in any school activities.

That leads us to our question of the week:

Why do some students not participate in any school activities, events and organizations?

Shontrea Hogans, Coordinator for Multicultural Student Engagement, indicates that the strongest reason could very well be the workload that students have from classes.

“Our students have a hard time getting involved in student events and student organizations because of their academic workload,” she said.

As a student who goes to AU, it can become overwhelming, so we understand that some students simply may not want to add the extra work since its already.

Some majors have a larger workload than others, so students with those majors are the primary people that don’t have the time to participate in school events and school organizations.

“A lot of our students are going on to be doctors, dentists, and all of these kinds of things so I think they struggle to have the time to balance both their academic workloads and things like internships, clinics, and all of those kinds of things,” said Hogans.

We heard from our expert, but what about the perspective of a student who isn’t in any organizations at all?

“I feel like students don’t participate in those events because they don’t know anybody and they don’t want to go explore new things all the time,” said David Kunde.

What could we do as Jag Nation for these students? The least we can do is reach out to them because you never know who may need a person to talk to.

The last main reason that students don’t participate in school activities is because they don’t know these events exist. For those students who are in that category, there are multiple ways to find out what events are taking place.

AU’s website has an event page that highlights events that happen around the school. On the same website are a list of most of the clubs. You can listen around to hear about other clubs as well, especially on ClubFest day that happens at the beginning of every semester.

If you want to join a club, participate in school events, or just learn more about them, go to Multicultural Student Engagement which is located on the second floor of the Jaguar Student Activity Center.

Contact Kaeshon King at kaeking@augusta.edu.