Each semester the Pioneer Involvement Center (PIC) holds an involvement fair for students on campus. This event allows students to see what kind of organizations and clubs the campus has to offer. During this event, students are able to walk around Heritage Hall and talk with almost every organization on campus. This year the involvement fair ran from Jan. 31 through Feb. 2.

“During the spring semester, we have 20 tables set up each day and this year all of those tables were full every day. We even had about 10 groups that we could not fit in due to space,” junior biology and broad field science major and involvement fair coordinator Kaitlin Ripley said.

The PIC puts in a lot of hard work and time to make this event happen. Ripley said they pick out dates that don’t conflict with other major events and then send and receive forms from the organizations, which they sort through and approve. After approval, Ripley organized the event to try and make sure that each organization had at least one day where they could present what their organization had to offer to students at the fair.

Those working in the PIC are not the only ones that have to prepare for the involvement fair, the organizations and clubs have to prepare for the event as well.

“In order to prepare for this event, we put our poster together… It has a lot of our posters on it saying what we do and what sort of events we have coming up,” sophomore environmental engineering major and event producer at Campus Programming and Relations Tara Gambon said.

Many of the organizations who attended the fair had many people show interest and even sign up to be a part of their organization. Ripley and Gambon both said this semester’s involvement fair was a success. It was in a good location that allowed for a lot of foot traffic, which resulted in more people stopping and interacting with the organizations. Even though the fall involvement fair allows for more tables and a bigger space, the spring involvement fair still had a good number of attendees.

“[The spring involvement fair] allows new and transfer students to get an idea of what organizations are on campus,” Gambon said.

Overall, this event was a success. If you missed this event, you can still go onto the PioneerLink website and see all of the organizations on the University of Wisconsin-Platteville campus and find one that fits your interests. Getting involved is a great way to meet new people who share similar interests, so don’t wait to get involved.