College: Four Years of Busy Schedules and Poor Planning

In this week’s Brand Ambassador guest blog post, Cornell senior Jordan Harrison breaks down her experience planning events in college. From a lack of event tech tools to a generally non-committal, last-minute college mentality, most of us can identify with her struggles. This is the type of feedback that allows us to continually improve our event planning platform. While other event planners may sugar coat their experience, college students tend to be more honest. If you’re interested in finding out what the SquadUP Brand Ambassador Program is all about, head to squadup.com/ambassador. In addition to the incentives (from iPads and cash to internships and school credit), we make sure to avoid busy work at all costs. You won’t be assigned weekly tasks. Instead, we’ll ask you to use SquadUP for the relevant events in your life and provide us with feedback.

College: Four Years of Busy Schedules and Poor Planning

As a young adult, I have experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly of planning events in college. After a week or two of planning and navigating the different time commitments for the perfect reunion for your freshman year gal pals you finally get them all commit to a time and place. Great. But conflicts arise and one by one they slowly start to cancel until eventually you reach the point where you’re stuck in your apartment re-watching seasons of Breaking Bad on Netflix. Sounds familiar?

Then there’s the ultimate disappointment when your best friend can’t make it to your birthday party because a professor assigned a paper due the next day for some serious extra credit points. Or maybe you are the social chair for your sorority or fraternity and after weeks of setting up a fantastic mixer, the other party decides to cancel out of the blue. It all just sucks. Planning events in college–even just a simple coffee date with an old friend to catch up-is becoming harder to do with the pressures placed on us to get the perfect job or internship which means we have to commit to long hours boosting our GPA or finding new leadership activities on campus to brighten up our resumes. However, despite the stress of school and whatever else is going on, we are always looking for a good time to hang out with friends (not including the roommates you see every day, all day) and relieve some stress, to reconnect with the things and people who make us the happiest. And despite the major improvements social media and technology has made to help us find that perfect time for everyone, it’s still a struggle. And if you need to collect money from your friends or guests, you’re about to face a whole new category of frustration.

As a Cornell student, event planning has always been hard when figuring out peoples’ schedules and then when I finally have the perfect timing for everyone, getting people to commit to it. And as a Type-A party planner, I’m always looking for a new, efficient way to get people to come to things and reconnect with old friends while making sure that they will be in attendance. Because hey, who wants to throw a party of one? Not this girl, that’s for sure. College students are always looking for the newest way to host events that provide flexibility in regards to time but are also fun. At the end of the day nothing is more satisfying than setting up a group invite, getting those confirmations, and knowing that you will be seeing friends old and new because we all need that time away from job/internship searching, homework, and whatever else college throws at us. If only there was an event planning platform built for college students like me. One that would help me juggle schedules and if I need, sell tickets, accept donations, or collect RSVPs. If only… ;). Thanks, SquadUP!