One of the very few and far between bright spots of our otherwise gloomy college lives is right around the corner- symposia. The very obvious lack of any sort of culturals makes us long for this event more eagerly than a greedy kid waits for Christmas! As usual though, we were a bundle of nail-biting nerves, wondering what new and wonderful rules the management was going to throw in our faces this year. A couple of days ago, we were summoned to the ‘symposium meeting’ to find out just that. Seated haphazardly around the table in our shocking green conference room, we eyed each other warily, and waited for the axe to fall. As it turns out, it wasn’t as bad as we expected. A quick look at the positives and negatives of the decisions made, .. starting with the good news:
- They dint try and call off the whole thing- which knowing them, is a fairly big deal!
- They’ve actually decided to increase our budget (gasp), as this year happens to be our wonderful college’s silver jubilee year. (the actual incremented amount I shall mention in the ugly side! )
- There is no actual cut off on the number of outside participants allowed into the college (Last year, it was officially limited to 40!)
- We’re allowed FOUR whole inter college events. If you’re wondering why that’s a big deal, we were only allowed ONE last year.
- They very sweetly discussed and planned out minute details of the budget with us, right down to mementos for the chief guests and stationery for participants. And we very sweetly, did not bother to note down a word they said!
- err.. ok that’s about it.. unless u count the fact that we missed class cause of the meeting!
Ok, so now the downside. Due to space constraints, I shall only mention the WORST things, and ignore petty annoyances. Here goes:
- We have barely any time at all. Only a couple of weeks, to get events done, posters ready, send out invites, print banners, design website and select papers!! Plus, they’re pretty miserly about letting us off class.
- The final budget proposed at the meeting –I’m so ashamed to say it, sigh- a sickening pittance- 15 grand. And now, they’ve very kindly increased it to 18, with an “yes I know, we are generous aren’t we” air. How we’ll manage with this is beyond me.
- No sponsors. Period.
- No posters or banners or any other “fancy decoration works” to be displayed on campus. Only one measley thing inside the hall.
- No non-techie events at all, the most we can have is a semi-technical quiz, for which we have to reduce and restrict participants.
- We have to force feed the participants our canteen food, by giving them lunch tokens. I ask you, where is the money for it?? And why would you want to give them dyspepsia??
- And most embarrassing of all, we have to make sure that even participants follow the dress code, which means anyone wearing a tee or a “pants full of big big packets” (guys and girls!) and if they do stroll in, we have to bodily throw them out!
But other than that, I’m pretty sure we’ll end up having loads of fun organising it. So gung ho for Interrupt ’09! J
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