This year’s Syracuse University Showcase will feature student- and faculty-produced videos on sustainability for the first time, but the new exhibit initially saw less interest than anticipated.

The deadline to submit sustainability-related videos was originally April 11, but it was extended to April 18 after the number of submissions fell short of expectations. As of Tuesday evening, Roman Yavich, a gradate student in the Master of Public Administration program, received three videos and is waiting for two to come in, as well as two more that may come through. He said he originally hoped for 10, but was not disappointed.

‘I think that people are just busy,’ he said. ‘I think that making a video is a pretty time-consuming thing.’

The video submissions are one of several changes for this year’s SU Showcase, in which students will present projects on the theme of sustainability on May 2.

‘This is the first year that we’re doing this, and it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment type of thing,’ he said.

SU Showcase will take place in Panasci Lounge in the Schine Student Center from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., as opposed to last year when most of the presentations were held on the Quad, said Rachel May, coordinator of sustainability education. Officials who organized SU Showcase last year recommended moving it inside, given it was not the best situation for people to hear presentations outside, May said.

The video ideas resulted from collaboration between May and Students for Tomorrow’s Environmental Policy, a graduate student organization that studies environmental policy, Yavich said. Promotions for the videos began about a month and a half ago.

The videos have come from undergraduate students, graduate students and professors. Yavich said one video was about fishing in Nova Scotia and how local fishermen were suffering economically because fish farms were destroying wild fish.

Yavich is working with students in the College of Visual and Performing Arts to arrange the videos in a particular order. The videos will be screened in Schine, and Yavich hopes the videos will also play on television screens in places like the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, he said.

One aspect of SU Showcase that has remained the same between this year and last year is the theme: sustainability. There is a lot of student research going on with sustainability, and the university wanted to include climate change and sustainability in its curriculum, May said.

There will ‘easily’ be 100 displays in Panasci, ranging from class projects to individual ones that visitors will be able to see or touch, May said. The projects will be arranged by themes rather than departments.

Said May: ‘Having those all grouped together means you can have engineers and social workers and people from lots of disciplines all kind of mingling in one place.’

mcboren@syr.edu

 

Published on April 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm