This past Saturday, Palousafest welcomed students back to University of Idaho campus with food and games. Booths filled the street, representing clubs, organizations and businesses. Hundreds of students packed Sixth Street between Line and Rayburn Street, also flowing onto the Tower Lawn.
Tightly packed they peered, chatted and signed up to different representatives of clubs, and organizations. Many of these students were unmasked brushing shoulder to shoulder with others. This is in sharp contrast to the rapid increase of the average number of daily new COVID-19 cases in the county, more than doubling in the last month. Current UI policy does not dictate that students are required to be vaccinated, though they are unable to due to an executive order signed by Gov. Brad Little.
While masks are required in on campus buildings, this does not dictate a face-covering for outdoor events.
The event kicked off with a performance by the UI Marching Band and Cheerleaders on the Tower Lawn to the mass of spectators until they marched southward towards the Memorial Gym.
With the large number of attendants, many clubs expressed their positive outlook for the coming semester in terms of membership and being able to do group activities again.
Katie Fischer, VP of UI Ski Club, found the club was limited last year due to the pandemic.
“We had all of our races last season canceled, just due to the fact that we race against multiple other colleges,” Fischer said.
Even though those races were canceled they were still able to do a week long training course, and avalanche training through close work with the university and ensuring COVID-19 testing of club members.
Spencer Bordenick of The American Institute of Architecture Students reflected on the organization’s past year.
“We were completely online, which was pretty hard I would say. With architecture, things are very dependent on an in person environment with a studio,” Bordenick said. “Moving to online was a pretty intense shift, but we managed and we had great turnouts at our events we hosted through Zoom, and overall it was good experience based on the scenario we were in.”
For the coming semester, Bordenick said they were hopeful, but were fully willing to adapted based on the situation that unfolds.
Madelynn Gregoire, the president of the Society of Women Engineers chapter at UI spoke about how COVID-19 hurt involvement in the club due the mental health effects from lockdown. She hopes to see a difference this semester.
“We’re hoping to have more in person meetings because the (vaccination) rate is starting to go up, but also we do offer like a virtual option,” Gregoire said. “Our goal is to just to help people you know meet more friends and things like that, because they didn’t get as much of opportunity last year because of COVID and have a lot of fun meetings!”
Many other tables shared these sentiments looking forward. Hopeful for a new generation of students to join, and expand their club, and to get back to doing activities they did before COVID-19. If you are looking to join a club or create your own there is a page on UI’s website.
Cory Summers can be reached at [email protected]