The concept of Choose-a-Palooza was established several years ago as part of Minnesota State University-Mankato’s annual Welcome Week events. Welcome Week is a 4-day series of events and activities that welcome students to campus each year before classes begin. Choose-a-Palooza was established as a fun activity to get students to visit and become familiar with the services of different offices and resources (both academic and social) on campus. The current structure of Choose-a-Palooza was established last year and was replicated during this past Welcome Week in August. The event was organized by the Office of Residential Life and the Women’s Center.

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The purpose of Choose-a-Palooza is to get students to find, visit, and speak to representatives in the various campus offices within the Divisions of Student Affairs and Academic Affairs. This event occurs as a part of the Welcome Week Activities and this year was held on the Friday before classes started. Various campus offices were contacted and asked to participate. Several of these offices organized their own sets of activities for students to participate in when they arrived at the office. Office also informed students about their purpose and the services they provide. Many offices included giving away prizes or promotional items to advertise. For example, the Residence Hall Association gave away free popcorn and soda and incorporated a coloring contest where the floor with the most entries in each Residence Community received a prize.

On the day of the event, students were able to pick up a campus map at the Front Desk of each Residence Area that listed which offices were participating. The map also listed how many raffle tickets (ranging from 1 to 3) each office would give students for taking the time to find their office. Students were given two hours to travel around campus and visit these offices to collect tickets. At the end of the two hours, students gathered in our student union and were able to enter their tickets into several prize drawings. The prizes consisted of movie packages and move-in items as well as our two top prizes of $100 Flex dollars donated by Dining Services and a Nintendo Wii. We had $800 worth of prizes and had 19 different prize packages that students could enter to win. All prizes were drawn after all tickets were turned in and students had to be present to receive a prize. We gave away the top prizes last.

Our staff members played a vital role in getting residents to participate and were also allowed to collect tickets; however, they could only enter their tickets into drawings for extra floor funds or a pizza party for their floor.

We relied on our graduate staff to facilitate and emcee the prize drawing. They staffed tables to ensure that prizes didn’t walk away, provided a CD of music to play as students were turning in tickets, and emceed the event to announce winners.

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The purpose of Choose-a-Palooza is to get students to find, visit, and speak to representatives in the various campus offices within the Divisions of Student Affairs and Academic Affairs. This event occurs during Welcome Week before classes start, so it is a good way to introduce new students to the locations of these offices and for them to see and explore what resources are available on campus to help them. It is also a good way for each office to advertise their services to new students and for office staff to meet the new student class.

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The positive and lasting effects of the program are that new students learn where each office is located on campus, learn what their services are, and hopefully, students will remember and utilize the services of these offices. The staff in each office also has a lot of fun with this event by creating promotional items and creative ways to advertise the services of their office to students. One of the lasting effects of this program this past August was that we had over 400-500 students show up for the prize drawings. This means that all of those students, plus any other students that might not have shown up for the prize drawing, participated and learned about the various resources that are available to them on campus.

Additionally, the coloring sheets used by RHA for the coloring contest were cartoon representations of each Residence Community, and sparked interest from Residential Life and other offices on campus. This may lead to the development of a campus-wide coloring book as a promotional item.

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Overall, Choose-a-Palooza was an extremely successful event this year. In past years, only 300 students have participated in the final prize drawings. This year, we had over 400-500 students packed in our Student Union for the drawing. The Director of our Student Union said she has never seen that many people in the Union at one time. Campus offices came up with creative ways to attract and advertise their services to students and had fun. The prize packages were also very popular and students enjoyed seeing the Wii as a top prize as many students entered into this drawing. This year we stayed away from getting the popular electronics such as an iPod or digital cameras, because students told us not to get those items as many of them already own them. Having Residence Life staff facilitate the prize drawing was also extremely successful as they had fun interacting with students in a positive way, hyped up the program a lot, and it allowed the organizers to ensure that the proper administrative paperwork was returned as prizes were given out. Improvements for next year include asking for a bigger budget, getting more students input, and including other offices such as the Athletic Department.

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This program could easily occur on other campuses. I believe it is best suited for early in the semester or directly before classes start. One would need to work with various offices on campus related to Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, and possibly Athletics to get their buy-in and participation. We relied on each office to prepare and fund what they would do when students arrived in their office. Then designate a central location on campus for students to gather and enter the tickets they receive into a prize drawing. For larger campuses, one may need to extend the time that students have to visit offices or choose offices that are close together that students can easily walk and get to within the time limits.

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