On Friday, Jan. 20, The Office of Student Activities and Leadership (SA&L) held the first spring Student Activity Fair consisting of 129 student groups. An addition to the usual fall activity fair, the event is designed to provide students with more opportunities to get involved on campus.

The Student Activity Fair is usually hosted by Undergraduate Student Government during orientation every fall. It is one of the few opportunities where students can meet almost all student organizations on campus at once. Students that miss the fair in the fall may have a harder time joining an organization.

“There are a bunch of freshmen who still want to get involved, but the Student Activity Fair in the fall was really hard to navigate and it’s a little overwhelming,” said Susan Kozawa, a graduate student intern at the SA&L. “So we were trying to come up with a way to get more students involved, especially older students like juniors—even seniors.”

SA&L decided to hold an additional Student Activity Fair in the spring to help first-year students get more involved on campus and to let upperclassmen pursue the interests they did not have a chance to earlier in their college lives.

“There are two kinds of people, [those] who sign up for everything, and [those] who wait, and this is for the students who wait,” said Kozawa.

Compared to hundreds of organizations at Freiberger Field in the fall, fewer organizations appeared in the Tinkham Veale University Center for the spring Student Activity Fair. According to Kozawa the time was the major reason for the lower turnout.

“We thought about this in December and when we started to talk with our groups, a lot of them were very interested in it,” explained Kozawa. “Then we offered it to other student groups but because of time limitation, it might have been hard for them to [prepare].”

Despite only having a short amount of time to prepare, Kozawa was happy with the number of student groups that participated.