The Other Side of Oswego’s Nightlife
By Brian Krosky and Taylor Ksiazek
Laker Nights
Hall Directors and Resident Assistants try and make sure residents are following the rules and promote safety. They also understand how college kids are spending their weekend nights. How do they balance fun with safety in a late-night, college setting?
At SUNY Oswego, Laker Nights are a series of campus events put on throughout the year. The events are created and promoted by Residence Life and Housing (ResLife) staff members. The Resident Assistants (RA) are those that are involved in-depth with each of these events. It is also a competition between each building for who can put on the best event.
If you walked into Funnelle Hall during its Laker Night and saw people dressed in outfits from the early twentieth century, you’d be entering “Funnelle Flashback”.
If you entered Oneida Hall and saw an ‘EDM’ room that had strobe lights, black lights, neon painting on the walls and people dancing with glow sticks, you’d be entering ‘Beats By Oneida.’
Despite the events occurring throughout the semester for different halls, they all begin with the same pre-planning much earlier. When RAs come for summer training, they start to brainstorm some ideas for the theme of the event. After the first staff meeting of the year, they decide on the theme and date.
The RAs are also responsible for preparing decorations, food, games, and prizes. They are also heavily responsible in getting the word out to other students to attend the event. Justin Penman, an RA in Oneida Hall, was in charge of the marketing for his hall’s event.
“One way I thought that it would be fun is have recognizable albums, because when people see those on the street they’ll be like ‘Yeah, I know that album’,” Penman said. Since Oneida’s experience revolved around music, he decided to get creative with how he advertised it.
He took popular music albums and photoshopped the faces of members of Oneida Hall’s staff on them. “I wanted to have an eye-catching advertisement,” he said. “So they ways that I disseminated it were through The Oswegonian [Student newspaper], we had print ads. We had ads on digital signage across campus so on every TV that has ads on it you would see that Oneida Hall ad we had.”
Every hall is given a budget of around $200 for their respective program. But that money is not necessarily the final amount, explained Funnelle Hall Director Butch Hallmark.
“If we want to go above and beyond that, we can use our own programming money we can request money from hall council, or our community development specialist, so really…the sky’s the limit for these programs,” he said. “We look at the building and the space that we have and we just kind of use the strengths that we have.”
To give an estimation on how many students show up to Laker Nights, Penman said somewhere between 350–400 students went to Beats By Oneida, and he said they had one of the larger, more successful events. But, he also said attendance can vary by hall.
“Johnson [Hall] is a prime example because you have a lot of freshman, and they are there to be active in the community,” he said. “So they’ll get more attendance to their regular programs”
When preparing these events, it’s not necessarily the main goal to be used as a deterrent for drinking or partying, but it is definitely thought about by everyone involved. The target population is somewhat split in two. One of the main goals is to bring in people who may not want to go out and party, but also give a safe alternative to those who do.
After the event students are asked to complete a survey. They evaluate the program based on how creative and fun it was. It then asks what would they normally be doing if they weren’t at Laker Night, with the options including drinking alone, drinking with friends, watching TV, doing homework, studying, nothing and eating at the dining hall.
“From Funnelle, with our Laker Night, I noticed that a lot of people would have been drinking if they had not been there,” Hallmark said. “Of course, you never know how honest people are on those things but I think that was a pretty genuine response.”
“They’re all kind of really awkward and really forced, it’s forced fun,” said senior Hayley Prenatt. “You kind of show up and they’re like ‘oh play all these weird games, here’s some food’ and then you just kind of stand there.”
Prenatt believes that ResLife puts too much pressure on the staff that’s running the events, and in return the staff puts too much pressure on the participants attending, or the ones they are trying to convince to attend.
The giant elephant in the room during these events is the coinciding times between the event itself and when students usually began to drink in preparation for the night out.
“Research has shown and it’s pretty obvious if you live here you know that that’s kind of the time that pregaming typically starts,” Hallmark said. “So having this large scale event where all of campus is invited. We know that that curbs that behavior. We know that even for that one night, those two hours, we are getting people that normally would be drinking to come to these programs.”
“I’ve gone to parties and bars after,” Prenatt said. “It’s not deterring me from going to them, it’s just something to do before it to fill the time.”
Another reason why Laker Nights exist is to get people who don’t like to party and drink an option to participate in a big social atmosphere, so they aren’t missing out if they don’t go out and drink.
“The goal in the back of our heads is that it will kind of curb that behavior,” Hallmark reiterated. “But really, we’re just putting on a large scale event.”
As mentioned, these Laker Nights only occur once a year for every hall, and the aspects of community involvement include much more than just this one event for the staffs of every hall.
Aside from these Laker Nights, it is expected of the ResLife community to put on an educational program once a week. There are 10 different topics such as alcohol and other drugs, sexual health, personal life skills, etc. The Funnelle Hall staff recognizes that Thursday and Friday nights are a big night for their residents to go out drinking. They decided to have a recurring program every other Thursday night. They believed a karaoke night would deter people from going to the bar, on a very popular drinking night in Oswego. Hallmark says that the attendance varies each week it’s held, but there’s generally a good turnout. Cayuga Hall does a weekly late night breakfast every Thursday. This is mostly to make sure those that are going out to drink have eaten beforehand. During this time, they will also throw in educational tidbits about drinking.
These events are put on so people can not only be safer when they will inevitably go out and drink, but also so those who don’t, have an option. Some people may just sit in their room and not be as social. This gives them the outlet to meet new people in their living communities.
Penman believes that a purpose for these events is to show the true side of the staff that people are living with, and that RA’s aren’t just the bad guys.
“It creates a community atmosphere, and that’s what Res Life is here for, to create a community-like atmosphere,” Penman said. “And when you have a big, fun event like this it makes it more worth people paying that res life and housing fee to go to events like these.”
Open Mic Night
By Brian Krosky
Open Mic Night is an experience for students to perform in front of their peers. It occurs every Thursday nights in the Lake Effect Cafe, the same night as Mug Night at Old City Hall, a popular event for students at Oswego. Hear the events of students who attend and perform at Open Mic and how it impacts how they spend their Thursday night in Oswego.
It’s 7:25 p.m. at the Lake Effect Cafe inside Penfield Library on SUNY Oswego’s campus. The simmering sound of cafe music plays over the chit-chatter of Oswego’s students talking about their respective days, weeks, or entire semesters.
The Lifestyles Center has a table set up with food for anyone who shows up, as the workers in the Lake Effect Cafe stay busy with orders of caffeinated products to keep the students awake throughout the night and finishing their weekly assignments.
Junior Nick Costanzo, the man behind the scenes, has finished setting up all of the sound equipment and is ready to receive the song requests from the performers.
Costanzo is paid by Lifestyles Center to control all of the sounds and equipment setup, always arrives early. All of the equipment is provided by the Lifestyles Center that they have already purchased.
“I get here at 6 o’clock,” he said. “We normally start at 7:30, if we have a lot of people already signed up we’ll start earlier. If we don’t have a lot we’ll push it back. But generally, 7:30.”
Costanzo isn’t the only one who shows up early, however. A group of students who are Peer Educators at Oswego also show up at 6 p.m. to help coordinate and organize open mic. These students take a class and receive credit hours for volunteering at certain Lifestyles Center events, like open mic.
The food comes around 7 p.m. as more students stroll in and the ambiance picks up. There’s a list at the table where the Lifestyles Center peer educators are sitting- a list that they are trying to fill up with names of people to perform.
“Some people just come to watch the event,” said Stacy Palacio, the host of open mic night. “I encourage my peer educators to go and talk to them.”
Often times students are shy about going up to perform, especially if it is their first time. If they are, Stacy and her crew try and talk to them and ease them into it. Sometimes people just want to watch, others, she said, just need a little push and motivation to perform.
Langston Smith, a student who is in the Vocal Effects singing group, performs solo for his first time.
“It’s not my first to open mic, but it’s my first time performing alone,” Smith said. “I saw flyers about it and I was kind of forced to come here with my singing group that I’m in. So I’ve never actually performed something alone. “I mean, I guess it went pretty well. I was a little on the nervous side, because I wrote that. So it’s the first time that I’ve performed something that I wrote, that’s why I got the jitters.”
Right before Langston performed, a pair of friends, Justin Carmona and Beatrice Rosa, went back-to-back with their own performances.
Rosa, a freshman, has been performing since she stepped onto Oswego’s campus.
“I was consistent last semester and I would follow the posts everywhere,” she said. “I started getting closer to him, [Justin] and I would talk about it.” She also tries to invite people just to come and watch, as her and Justin were surrounded by a group of friends.
“I just started this semester, really recently,” Carmona said. Rather than singing like a good portion of the performers, he preferred to do spoken-word. “I’m not comfortable putting my voice out for people,” he said. “Sometimes I think I sound good but I’m still just not comfortable. Poetry is something that I’m comfortable doing in front of people. I just like performing in front of people. This has kind of been an every other week thing so far. It’s like ‘I have a poem and a desire to perform this.’ Or if I am feeling down I like being around creative people.”
Palacio notices that younger students are often the ones showing up.
“I will say that I got a lot of first year students last semester because they didn’t know what to do and they were trying to look for friends,” she said. “But I do get a lot of returners.”
While many older students know about open mic, those first-year students are the ones that Lifestyles Center tries to convince to come, and it takes a heavy marketing effort to do so.
“We just make posters and tell people by word,” Palacio said. “We do a lot of social media and we share events. Our peer educators are good with that.”
Rosa found out about open mic by the flyer that was displayed near Mary Walker Health Center, and also the Toilet Talk flyers in bathrooms around campus.
Lifestyles sticks with the same, original theme of open mic for most of the semester, but there have some special events.
“There are things that we call ‘Special Open Mics’, we had a Valentine’s Day, we had a pajama night,” Palacio said. “We try to have a specific poster for that event. So we try a little more and try to get more people because we have a raffle.”
Palacio said there are about four to five of these semesters and they can help attract more people, because attendance is never a consistent commodity, usually due to inclement weather or other on-campus events.
As for the purpose of open mic as a deterrent for drinking and partying on Thursdays, especially for underaged students, the timing is not that big of a deterrent.
“Well I do know people that do both, if they are of age,” Palacio said. “It’s more optimally for people to have an option to do something during the week. It’s a safe environment. It ends at 10, so I don’t think that it’s an alternative. If you’re looking for something free and enjoyable, I think Thursday nights at open mic will be optimal because you get free food, free coffee.”
Rosa and Carmona, who are both underclassmen, don’t go out after open mic ends. “I personally don’t know anyone who goes out after open mic,” Rosa said. “The most ‘out’ I’ve seen people go out is to late night.“
Although it doesn’t seem to be an actual deterrent from late-night drinking, the students use this event as an avenue for self-expression, or a way to remain busy, as both Costanzo and Palacio do as one of their jobs. Costanzo, along with the financial compensation he receives, enjoys the few hours he spends in Lake Effect Cafe every Thursday for the different types of performers.
“You really get a wide variety that you don’t see everywhere,” he said. “It’s pretty dope! I enjoy it.”
“I think open mic is a way to get out of yourself, because people come here to express who they are,” Smith said. “They write songs, they sing about things and they tell jokes. I feel like it’s a safe space. It’s a safe haven where people can be themselves and will have no judgmental reaction.”
Shaun Cassidy Fan Club
By Taylor Ksiazek
Oswego’s Shaun Cassidy Fan Club is a tradition like no other. Improv comedy, obscene and unregulated language and rowdy laughter. But at the time the group performs every week, are they hurting themselves?
Shaun Cassidy Fan Club is an improv comedy troupe that performs from 8pm-9pm every Saturday. The attendance varies from show to show, usually dwindling down when hockey season is in full force. During the hockey off-season, this is one of the only weekly on-campus events. Many students look forward to the uncensored comedy, but is it a deterrent from going to the bars or parties?
Not for most.
Many people use this as “filler” time before they head to bars or to parties.
“I usually go only if there’s no hockey game” says senior Melissa McAnulty. Which is how many students use this event. The troupe is made up of a variety of people and anyone is allowed to join. Newcomers must have a certain number of practices before participating with the show, but they encourage people from any major to join.
If you don’t have friends in the troupe you might not even know it exists. The 100% student club advertises with flyers and not much else. “It’s something fun to do before going out. I usually go when there’s not much else going on…if I’m not there, during that time I’m just watching movies, I don’t really go out on Saturday’s unless I’m invited somewhere,” says McAnulty.
They don’t promote themselves as a drinking deterrent because those in the troupe may use this as “just something fun to do” before going out as well. Since this isn’t something to be put on as educational by the school it can’t really be pushed as a deterrent.
