Throughout this semester, Whitties have benefitted from a Saturday morning ski bus to the Bluewood ski area, a service made possible by left over ASWC funds from previous years. To take advantage of this opportunity, all one has to do is find the sign-up list in the OP office, write their name down, and show up at 8:30 am on Saturday. This seemingly simple task, however, has proven difficult for many.
Many students sign up for the ski bus and then fail to attend. Whether this is a result of late Friday nights, poor memory, or plain apathy, one thing is clear: signing up for the ski bus does not entail a lot of commitment.
First-year Hannah Sieracki cited a number of reasons for missing the ski bus on Saturday, February 21st, even though she had signed up in advance.
“I had a really tough week with lots of studying and almost no free time, and I wanted to stay out late on Friday, so I decided to take a lazy Saturday and skip skiing,” Sieracki said. “Money is also an issue. The cost can really add up when you’re paying for a lift ticket, ski rentals, and food.”
Lish Riley, Whitman’s OP Rental Shop Manager, confirmed this trend.
“If you sign up for the first week, you can sign up for any week, because it’s free. So, people sign up for all 4 weeks, and by the time it gets to the 4th week they forget about it,” said Riley. “There’s not a whole lot of commitment, so you’re like ‘Oh, I just want to do whatever the night before and sleep in, and who cares [if I miss it]?'”
Despite the significant number of students sleeping through the ski bus’s 8:30 am departure, people from the waiting list tend to fill their vacancies.
“Typically, around twelve people sign up and a couple more sign up on the wait list,” said Sophomore Carson Burns, an ASWC senator who helped initiate the ski bus program.
“Most of the time, the bus gets filled because the wait-listers fill the extra spots from the no-shows.”
After considering implementing a five dollar sign up fee to better ensure participation, the managers of the program decided against it.
“We decided against [a fee] because the bus is funded by the Student Development Fund… If the students already paid for [the ski bus] indirectly through their ASWC fee, it didn’t make sense charging them again. We were hoping that people wouldn’t sign up unless they actually planned on going,” Burns said. “Most of the time, this has been true, and students have followed through.”
Regardless of participation levels, the ski bus program does not seem like a waste of money to ASWC President Elliott Okantey. For Okantey, the quality experience provided for those who actually do participate is priority number one.
“If ASWC were an investment house, it would invest in one commodity: the student experience,” Okantey said. “The ski bus was never a for-profit venture. ASWC seeks to use the one-time Student Development Fund to sponsor student ideas and initiatives that develop student interests and skills in a way that Whitman has never seen before.”
According to Okantey, the future of the ski bus program, and all other programs of the Student Development Fund, are in the hands of those who participate.
“Some of these ideas are so new that it would not be inaccurate to refer to them as experimental,” said Okantey. “Sometimes experiments yield the expected results, sometimes they do not. ASWC has invested in adding a safe, dependable ride to and from Bluewood to the Whitman student experience. It is up to students ourselves whether our money will be well spent.”
