Festivals, college gatherings, and movie sleepovers—all are events organized to help students to enjoy their school lives. Ewha also has had its festive events—the Daedong festival, mini-Olympics, pear play concerts and many more in the month of May alone. Whereas the foremost objective of those events was to enable as many students as possible to participate, in fact attendance was disappointingly low. So, it is necessary to look closely at the attitudes of Ewha students which lead to such an uncooperative atmosphere and at the programs themselves, especially those designed by the Student Government Association.
One concept since the Ewha students have probably heard like a thousand is that a women’s university is always overly competitive, and individualistic. However, it is a serious distortion to take that as the real reason for the tendency of Ewha students to shun college gatherings.
Straightforwardly, students have no right to blame their cool passions on the school’s label as a women’s university when it’s they themselves who have contributed the greatest toward freezing each other’s passion for school events. The uncooperative atmosphere inside Ewha in terms of participating in the school events is something built up over the years—not a natural characteristic of being a women’s university.
When freshmen are newly accepted to the school, they bloom with expectations for their new university life, including the social gatherings. However, their fluttering hearts find no way to express such hopes in the middle of the dull faces of their seniors, who take the uncooperative atmosphere for granted and tell them that this is the way women’s universities have always been. Embarrassed from the first, those students then say the exactly same words to their juniors when they become seniors.
The fact that this uncooperative atmosphere have accumulated for long years does make it extremely hard to fix. However, even if the process is hard, it is not impossible if Ewha students change their attitudes. In the first place, the tendency to take the uncooperative situation for granted must be transformed. Nothing is going to change if students just keep on blaming the atmosphere and make no effort to take interest in school activities.
Additionally, another suggestion should be made to the SGA, which designs many of the programs for school activities. Many times, the Daedong festival has been criticized as a festival only for the SGA that actually organizes the event. In order to induce more students to participate, the programs should be more carefully organized. For instance, when celebrities come to perform, students usually take superficial interest in watching them, and the minute the performances are over, they immediately leave the scene. As for a contrasting example, students wait in long lines and passionately take photos of unique events like the giant common bowl of bibimbop (rice mixed with assorted vegetables) that students eat together. Likewise, in order to encourage student participation, festive events must be comprised of programs that are unique and meaningfully reflect the true atmosphere of Ewha.
To recapitulate, along with a prudent program for the Daedong Festival devised by the SGA, Ewha students must develop a willingness to participate, not only in the Daedong Festival, but year-around. It is on our hands.