Ode to SEB

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:20:00 -0400
seb

There's a kind of community spirit that involves cheering for the status quo: Without apologies, and hostile to any kind of change. And there's another kind of community spirit that involves working relentlessly to make a place the very best it can be, loving it even as you're trying to improve it. The Student Events Board embodies the latter spirit: UMBC black and gold to the core, but endlessly striving to take students' excitement and enjoyment of this campus to another level.

If you had fun on campus last week, there's a good chance SEB had something to do with it. They were the students in the orange or purple shirts handing you that cotton candy or popcorn, cooking up your crepes, singing out your Public Service Announcements, and handing you prizes when you won at your carnival games. They also were helping you make the best out of blackouts and thunderstorms, and spontaneously inventing random community-building nuttiness. And behind the scenes, they were spending hours moving, setting up, taking down and cleaning up equipment, and gearing up for a packed schedule of events beyond Welcome Week.

Sometimes SEB members get to spend a few minutes with the big name acts that come to campus. But as awesome as it might be to snap a photo with Snoop Dogg, most of what SEB'ers do is far less glamorous. For all of their hard work, I've never known any SEB success to be publicly associated with any member by name. Instead, SEB is about teamwork, patience, humor and collective achievement. And sometimes it's is about absorbing criticism, because not every event works out as well as members hope (like the foam party that fell victim to a hurricane and then a power outage), and not every act can appeal equally to everyone in the community.

So thanks for a great start to the semester, SEB. I'm really glad you do what you do.

(Anyone interested in working with SEB this year should check this out: http://my.umbc.edu/news/8366).

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