farner(in)

Well, here I am.

Life has been crazy the past few weeks.  I dealt with the passing of my great grandmother, I said goodbye to the wonderful people at Ritter Insurance Marketing and I made my way to Indiana, Pennsylvania.  I was an Orientation Leader for this year’s Welcome Weekend – we moved in over a thousand new freshmen Saturday morning and afternoon.  We also entertained 2,000+ students at the student union building on Saturday night.

Now that the pace seems to have slowed down, I’m finally starting to settle in.  In the next three to four months, this blog will probably cover very little about Central Pennsylvania.  From a social media standpoint, these will be the last few months in which I view the topic through student goggles.  There is, however, the possibility for something very cool.  As most know, I graduate this December (God willing) and will then venture out into the “real world”.  I would love to work in social media.  What better way to chronicle the trials and tribulations involved in a job search than with this blog?

I would also like to do a lot more video this semester. It seems as though funny things happen when I don’t have my Flip with me.  I saw a cop speed down the road and swerve around a car to pull over a cyclist yesterday.  Things like that need to be recorded on video.

I suppose that’s all for now.  I’ll eventually get back into posting regularly now that I’m here and growing used to my schedule.  If you’d like to get in contact at any time, you can do so via the Contact link in the top menu bar.  Until next time – adios, amigos.

So, it seems we’re in a bit of trouble.

The Mu Chi chapter of Alpha Phi Omega is now, for all intensive purposes, broke.  We were sitting on a hefty sum of money at the beginning of the 2007-2008 school year, and we’re now in the red.  How did we get this way?  Reckless spending, failure to collect dues and little to no income from fundraising projects.

For the 2008-2009 year, there are new officers with totally different philosophies on how things should be done.  I am totally confident that each one realizes we’re in a bad situation at the moment and is doing their best to get us out of it.  In this post, I’m going to lay a little bit of my fundraising plan out.

1.  Ask Businesses for Donations

I am not above begging local businesses to donate to APO.  We do a lot of service projects in the community, probably the most out of any group on campus, and that is not cheap.  I have already drafted a letter I”ll send out which kindly asks for any donation, big or small.

2.  Sell Advertising

The Alpha Phi Omega web site is not even finished yet, but when it is, I plan on selling some ad spots to any business that will pay the price.  Paying for an ad might be more of a goodwill gesture by a business at the start, since we won’t have much traffic.  It will at least give a business something in return for contributing to us.

3.  Find a Sponsor for Everything We Do

I mean everything.  I will look into getting a sponsor for homecoming t-shirts, date auctions or whatever other ideas we come up with.  I want to spend as little of our own money as possible and I’m going to try my hardest to spend zero of it.

As we get closer to the beginning of the semester, things will begin to take shape.  By then, the web site should be complete and I will have hopefully heard from businesses regarding donations and advertising.  At that point, I’ll be able to judge how successful these tactics are going to be for the coming year.

Have ideas?  Drop me an email or leave a comment.

To do what? In this case, remove a registration hold on my university account. The hold was placed there due to a parking ticket I’ve since paid, but yet the hold remains. Why it is still there is a mystery of epic proportions; why it takes 24 hours for it to vanish is even more mind-boggling. Call me a cynic, but “It will take 24 hours for the hold to be taken off” sounds a lot like “We’re going to give ourselves 24 hours to take your hold off because we want to flex what little muscle we have here in the Parking Services Office.”

We’re in a digital age, people. While much of the university is still a slow moving bureaucracy, the ticketing and registration systems are both ELECTRONIC. How hard is it to go in and remove someone’s hold immediately when they come pay their ticket? It’s a process that would probably take ten seconds, yet the person working at the desk just throws your money into the cash drawer and returns to doing absolutely nothing. Not even a call in afterwards will do any good. I can’t even bust on a student worker in this case – it was a campus police officer who both accepted my payment and answered the phone when I called later. I feel as though I have a right to complain in this case, because for as many tickets as I’ve paid, I’ve probably staffed at least one full time officer. True story.

I paid my fine off at 7:21am this morning. I’ll keep you updated as to when they actually remove the hold.