Dear ubsenior.buffalo.edu,
What were you thinking?
I mean, seriously.
What, in the name of all that is good and just in higher education were you thinking when you planned this year's senior brunch? We thought senior brunch was supposed to be a celebration with friends of an enormous achievement: a college education. Some champagne, some good food, the affably good-natured administrators of Student Affairs serving us a late-morning meal.
Instead, what we saw stopped just short of mob. It's kind of hard to celebrate being a senior when you're too busy elbowing the kid who managed to unceremoniously cut you off at the check-in desk because he decided he wasn't going to wait the hour that you did to have Dennis Black hand him an omelette. Nothing says civilized brunch affair like light lounge music played in an atrium while dozens of students push, shove, jostle and jockey for position to be the next "party of two."
As a result of your ?N and we mean this in the most absolutely flexible sense of the word in English ?N planning, we stood in line for over a half-hour to receive a fake rose, before deciding in utter defeat that we'd be better off going to the campus caf?(c) for brunch. Just so you know, it was 11:30 by then, and the campus caf?(c) stops serving breakfast at 11. We still went.
Our last memory of the university reaching out us as seniors is an utterly chaotic and amorphous blob of wet, disgruntled individuals cutting in front of other wet, disgruntled individuals who had been waiting in line longer as we, fed up with the whole thing, trudged across the muddy lawn to the commons in search of something better than appalling disorganization and a plastic flower.
The question that you have to ask yourself, ubsenior.buffalo.edu, is what exactly it was that you were hoping to achieve by having a senior brunch in the CFA (Center for the Arts) atrium, and why CFA staff weren't prepared to deal with the hordes of arriving students in a fair and efficient manner. The reason you need to engage in such important assessment and review is that if you intend to keep having these little parties you're going to have to do a better job of deciding who to invite and how to handle the door.
As we understand it, senior status is determined by number of credits. Almost any student with roughly 90 credits or more is eligible to attend senior brunch, regardless of whether or not said student is actually graduating in May. There are two problems with such a system. First, students who aren't graduating but have 90 credits can attend senior brunch. Second, it necessitates odd work-arounds for students in programs that take longer than four years ?N PharmDs for example ?N who have not completed their program but have still finished four years of undergraduate education.
Even with your current system it should be a minor technical manner to calculate how many enrolled students are above the 90-credit minimum and would therefore be eligible to attend senior brunch. Simple math then yields that if, say, 4,000 students have 90 credits and can attend senior brunch in a venue with, for example, 500 seats where the average time to seat, serve, and turn over a student is 20 minutes and the total event time is 120 minutes, then there are still 1,000 eligible students left out in the cold. For further numerical clarification, please see anyone with fifth grade math skills.
But let's say that you, ubsenior.buffalo.edu, in your enlightened beneficence decide that the event can run as long as necessary to seat and accommodate the hordes of seniors you had (not) anticipated. You double the duration to a full four hours, and instead of rushing students lengthen the average turnover time to 30 minutes. Great. That doesn't change the fact that 4,000 hungry and impatient students, lacking any kind of direction to form a queue, have instead formed a mosh pit in your lobby.
We're not being unreasonable here, ubsenior.buffalo.edu. We know that chaos theory applies to these things, and that it's difficult to predict exactly how many people will show up to an event, especially when the existing senior brunch attendance data is based on having it in a different venue like the student union. But, don't mistake us for fools. We know what a Lorenz Attractor is. We know that even a chaotic system can display a well-defined structure.
If this event is really supposed to be a big deal, and if you're going to set up cardswipe stations at the damned thing anyway, then maybe it might be helpful to force students to register for it. We have to do it for commencement anyway. Most of us have been doing the registration dance for four years already, and it would give you a pretty good idea of the headcount for an event like this. Find out how many people are coming, design your event space and queue management to accommodate them, and allocate the time and resources to serve them within the event window you specify.
On behalf of all of the seniors we know,
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
