Every semester, Syracuse University’s Student Centers and Programming Services faces a new juggling act as it coordinates available event spaces and dates with requests from student organizations.

The event space allocation on campus is a tricky process, said Scott Casanova, associate director for SCPS. The SCPS staff is responsible for scheduling when and where each student organization can host its programmed events.

The space allocation request process for spring 2016 started Oct. 28 and ended Nov. 4. During this time, SCPS received 96 different requests from SU student organizations, said Alex Snow, reservations and events manager for SCPS.

“We schedule everything across campus, except for the spaces in a few select buildings and anything to do with athletics,” Snow said.

This means that Snow and his colleagues control who gets to reserve space in venues like Goldstein Auditorium, Schine Underground and Skybarn.

To start the space allocation process, SCPS needs to make sure that all the groups that submitted a request are funded organizations. Although the groups do not need to be financed by SU’s Student Association to request a venue on campus, a bulk of the organizations are SA-funded. Therefore, SCPS waits to start the space allocation process until SA announces its division of funding, Casanova said.

After all the requests have been verified, SCPS lays out every organization’s first choice for date and venue on a calendar to see where the conflicts lie, Snow said.

The most requested venue is Goldstein Auditorium and the most popular dates in the spring semester are usually the Friday and Saturday after spring break, Casanova said. This means there are a lot of scheduling conflicts Snow and Casanova must resolve.

SCPS looks at the specific needs of each event to determine which space best suits the function, Casanova said.

“If you are looking to host a concert, and you’re planning to bring a big national act, then Goldstein is really the only place for something like that,” he said.

Other events can be more flexible in their location if they do not demand as many technical resources, Casanova said.

In the spring, most of the events are annual events, so SCPS can anticipate when they need to be scheduled, Casanova said. However, spring holidays that bounce around, such as Easter and Passover, can create some challenges, he said.

Not only is SCPS responsible for allocating event spaces for student organizations, but it also must accommodate university-wide events that specific colleges and offices, such as the Admissions Office, host. Events like Family Weekend, Orange Central Homecoming, accepted students days and the College of Visual and Performing Arts Senior Fashion Show are all exempt from the space allocation process and are automatically scheduled, Casanova said.

However, SCPS does its best to accommodate SU’s student organizations.

“Being that we are the students’ center, and Goldstein Auditorium, Schine Underground are technically student spaces, we try to give them the first shot to the best of our ability,” Casanova said.

With the high demand for event spaces and the popularity of certain dates, not everyone walks away with their first choice of time and place for their event, Snow said.

“People complain,” Casanova said.

But he added that they work to the best of their ability to provide students with a venue and a date that would best suit their organization’s needs.

Organizations that submitted space allocation requests for spring 2016 should expect to hear back from SCPS on Wednesday confirming their scheduled event space and date, Snow said.

“Our main priority in this juggling act is to make sure that every organization that has been allotted funds and that has put in a request walks away with a secured space,” Snow said. “It may not always be their first or second choice, but our goal every semester is to have them walk away with a space that fits the event they have described.”

Published on November 10, 2015 at 10:22 pm

Contact Kate: kacapoda@syr.edu