The Student Senate’s Committee on Student Life is focusing it’s initiatives on school spirit this year. Among the projects that the committee is working on are the Go Be Red campaign, the creation of a Spirit Committee, and a proposal for a CDTA bus route to downtown Troy on Fridays and Saturdays.
The Committee on Student Life is a Senate Committee charged with making proposals regarding improvements to student life at RPI, and an extension of that mandate is the cultivation of school pride and spirit—a goal the committee is strongly pursuing this term. According to the committee’s chairman, Max Yates ’06, “One of our big centerpieces is the student life initiative. The major problem facing students at RPI today is spirit…At other schools, students put aside their school work to go to a big game.”
To foster a stronger interest in school sporting events, the committee has proposed the Go Be Red campaign. This campaign would encourage teams of three students to attend RPI athletic events over a 3-month period in order to earn points. The winning team would then be slated to receive a fully-paid spring break.
At present, none of the committee’s members know of any truth to the incipient rumors of free game tickets to boost school spirit, although it is believed that an initiative of that nature would come at the behest of the Grand Marshal, if at all.
The Committee on Student Life is also pursuing the creation of a spirit committee to extend and increase the campus enthusiasm it is hoped the Go Be Red campaign will foster. The committee will be comprised of students from UPAC, Committee on Student Life, and the hall councils, as well as Residence Life staff, Union Administration staff, and other faculty.
One of the more known about projects on the Committee on Student Life agenda is the CDTA bus route to downtown Troy on Fridays and Saturdays. Late last year, there was a great deal of interest in this Senate initiative, titled Project Troy, that aimed to provide shuttle service to Troy in addition to a group of Troy merchants offering RPI students various events and discounts. However, the committee had been giving misleading reports to the Senate, and the project never went beyond the planning phase.
While Yates did not want to speak about many of the details of this project since it has yet to come to fruition, he did say that it is on the committee’s agenda and that if successful, the project will indeed entail “CDTA—not Red Hawk shuttles—going to downtown Troy on Friday and Saturday Night.”
