A Dirty Sanchez ticket for your student diary? Having run out of student diaries halfway through Registration, the SU are trying to cope with unprecedented demand by asking students who don’t want their diaries to give them up for the chance to win concert tickets.
For many students the diary is considered a necessity to act as a reminder of lecture attendance. For others, its use is still being determined. Regardless of your own view, the absence of the College diary from some students’ bags is being felt. For those poor students with nothing to glance through during dull lectures, they have been left wondering why they’ve been deprived of the somewhat interesting reading material.
This year, the regular College diary was merged with the SU guidebook which gives detailed accounts of different aspects of College and includes welcome introductions from each of the SU sabbatical officers. According to Student Union President Cathal Reilly, this amalgamation was a triumph as it “reduced the amount of paper printed, and the cost was much lower than printing the two”. However, the new diaries were either so limited in number or so popular that they ran out halfway into Registration week.
Cathal Reilly said this was due to the “unprecedented demand” of diaries during registration. “Every year, not every student takes a copy of the diary, knowing that they won’t use it and as such, college generally doesn’t print one for every student as this would leave a lot as waste. This process was employed again this year; however there were very few students this year who decided not to take the diaries.”
Having completed a short survey among students ranging from the Arts Block to the Nurses’ Building asking whether they had been given the option of taking a diary all said that they had just been given them. One students said “I was just handed mine at registration, if I’d known that there was a chance that another student wouldn’t get one because I’d taken it, I wouldn’t have taken it.”
The excessive demand may be accounted for by the increase of registering students this year. As of October 22 2008, 14,145 students have registered. These figures are up from 13,625 in the same peroid last year.
Cathal Reilly has said that the SU are looking into ways of providing the students with the missing diaries, without having to order more copies in which he believes would “be a huge financial burden for either college or the SU”. The proposed remedy is to give all those who return their unused diaries the chance to be entered into a draw to win tickets for the upcoming Dirty Sanchez show. Having spoken to many students, it appears it may take a lot more than a Dirty Sanchez ticket to take their diaries off them.
