While some students were determined to turn this year's Spring Weekend theme into "The Greatest 'Wasted' Show on Earth," administrators took a greater preventative role in promoting alcohol safety.
Each year, Spring Weekend festivities at universities across the country pose significant challenges to collegiate administrators, security services and medical service providers, as students plan on consuming significant amounts of alcohol both on and off campus.
Peer Educators, the Alcohol and Other Drug Education club that sponsors alcohol awareness and responsibility, decided to duplicate and modify its typical freshman Core Programming in the freshman dorms in the days before Spring Weekend.
At these meetings, members of Peer Educators demonstrated the portion sizes of standard servings of alcohol, explained the role of tolerance levels in alcohol consumption and conveyed the typical signs of alcohol poisoning and blackout behavior to freshmen, in order to encourage students to have a responsible weekend.
Ed Wahesh, director of AODE, was supportive of this preventative measure and is in the process of compiling data on the effect of the programming on actual alcohol consumption during the following weekend.
"On the surface, there seems to be a greater number of upperclassmen with intoxication calls, indicating that the program had positive results," Wahesh said.
The Judicial Office of Student Affairs, the Office of Residential Life and Fordham University Emergency Medical Services are working this week to compile the number of alcohol-related incidents that occurred during Spring Weekend.
While some speculate that there were more of these incidents than in previous years because of the number of times FUEMS was called, this does not necessarily mean that there were more alcohol transports. It means, simply, that members of the administration sought to examine more closely possible problematic cases before any significant health or safety risk was eminent to the student or his or her surroundings.
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