The Future of Student Life at PVCC
As finals week approaches, PVCC students prepare for the last exams before winter break, and classes begin to wind down. This is not the case for Mary-Evelyn Sellars, PVCC’s new coordinator for student life and campus engagement, who is busy ensuring that the last weeks of the fall semester are filled with activities and events, as well as making preparations for the upcoming spring semester.
Since starting at her position right before the beginning of the fall semester, Sellars has been working not only to promote and organize campus events but also to improve PVCC’s student clubs. Early in the semester, she organized and ran a training seminar for representatives from each of PVCC’s 53 student clubs to make sure that club leadership understands how to advertise their clubs, organize their budgets, plan group trips, and work with the Student Government Association (SGA).
Sellars intends to continue this focus by working to teach proper leadership structure and parliamentary procedure within the clubs. Sellars said, “When you’re in college clubs, later, hopefully, when you become an adult, you’re going to go out into society and might be a leader or rotary… So, we don’t want our students to not know how to run an organization correctly.”
In addition to working with the internal structure of clubs, Sellars is also working to promote more external interactions between clubs and other students, encouraging clubs to organize events open to all students rather than just club members. By doing so, clubs will not only be contributing to the list of events at PVCC, but they will also be able to engage more with potential members.
To explain more about her choice of focus, Sellars said, “We want our students to feel they have a purpose… not just coming here and commuting home, we don’t want community college to be like that.” Sellars has personal experience with the pitfalls of campuses that lack engagement, having herself graduated from community college, which she described as hardly having events.
Sellars has been working towards those goals this semester, and she plans to continue pursuing them in the year to come when the Woodrow W. Bolick Advanced Technology and Student Success Center is scheduled to open its doors. With the Bolick Building’s new student center and more space for clubs, Sellars intends for it to be a key part of student engagement in the years to come, saying “The new student center is going to really be the pinnacle of the college.”
Students are likely to see Sellars in the halls of PVCC, overseeing events and other preparations. Readers of The Forum can expect to see her referenced in other articles as well. If you want to reach out to her, you can email her at MSellars@pvcc.edu.
