The Students for Environmental Action (S.E.A) is proud to host the first “Do It In the Dark” university-wide competition! This event will take place between each dorm building to reduce energy consumption on both the Mount Carmel and York Hill campuses. The competition began March 23 and will continue until April 20th. The event is to encourage the student body to conserve energy in their Residential Halls by doing simple things such as turning off lights when not in the room, unplugging electronics when not being used and just being more conscious of reducing power. Each dorm room will be placed in brackets so that every week each building will be challenging another in their bracket. All the buildings will be reviewed weekly to see how much energy they have reduced since the competition began. The first week there will be 13 buildings competing, the second week there will be 6 buildings competing (7 will move into the consolidation, or losers’, bracket), and the final week there will be 3 buildings fighting for the championship spot and 6 fighting to be consolidation champion.
Students can see how much energy they have conserved at dashboard.net/Quinnipiac. There, they will find a list of all the dorms that have conserved the most to which ones have conserved the least. You’ll be surprised which buildings actually INCREASED their energy consumption the past few weeks.
Keith Woodward, the head of the facilities department, will calculate the percentages reduced and announce the winners, that information will be relayed to Residential Life, from where it will be relayed to the students.
At the end of the competition, the winner will be displayed on a special MYQ web page, win an ice-cream social sponsored by Chartwells and Do It In The Dark champion t-shirts for everyone in the building!
The Students for Environmental Action hopes to educate, empower and motivate students to conserve resources, achieve measurable reductions in energy, power, and water use and establish a culture of conservation within the Quinnipiac community.
Jojo Burton, events coordinator of SAE said, “After this competition, we not only want to bring more sustainability to Quinnipiac, but we also want to show students the impact they are capable of making. By showing them how much energy we as a school saved over three weeks, students will hopefully start to understand that they can make a difference just by taking shorter showers or by turning off the lights when they leave the room. In essence, after this competition we want students to see the importance of saving energy and how it can help each of us reduce our carbon footprints.”
The Students for Environmental Actions meets every Wednesday at 9:15 in Tator Hall 232. New members are always encouraged to come and help create sustainability on the Quinnipiac campus.