Article by Artem Shvadskiy (Q18) & Vikram Bhandari (Q18)

It’s official…mandatory IQ events are a thing of the past. After analyzing the voice of the customer, QUEST Director and Bowtie Officianado Dr. Bailey, along with other members of the Quality Guild, has decided to rethink QUEST’s approach to these activities. The events will continue, make no mistake of that. Now, however, instead of being confined by the bounds of an LE (Learning Event) or CE (Community Event), QUEST events will have a larger community focus with an emphasis on innovative ways of bringing QUEST together. This shift involves taking the co-curricular component out from the LE events and putting them into the 190, 390, and 490 curriculums. Also, by placing many of the learning aspects of IQ events into the courses, concepts can be better tailored to the education level of the students; seniors participate in more advanced concepts, while sophomores start with basic issues. Instead of mixing social and learning aspects into one event, QUEST is separating them in order to push both aspects to new boundaries.

This change can be viewed as an ultra-modernization of the IQ events which places a significant amount of faith in the students. No longer constrained to Blackboard, Facebook invites fill these events quickly and efficiently – instead of taking days to pack the roster for an alumni dinner, the most recent alumni event reached full capacity in under an hour. This is exactly the direction that the events should be going since the goal is to encourage students to want to attend, rather than force them through mandatory credits.

This interest-based approach also allows the QUEST faculty to provide better events. By seeing which sessions are most heavily attended, QUEST will change the types of events offered so that students can make the most of their time in the program. For example, the packed room at Deloitte’s event proves that company visits seem to be popular. Expanding on this, there are plans to offer trips to visit companies on their own turf, which will provide even better real-world exposure.

As QUEST students progress through their three years, there will be semesters where they are not taking a QUEST course. Consequently, it is often difficult to stay in contact with fellow cohort members. Another major purpose of the change in IQ policy is to provide more events that are purely community focused, allowing everyone the opportunity to reconnect with fellow cohort members, or meet new people from other cohorts. QUEST is a community, and it takes the participation of members to keep a community thriving. We encourage everyone to attend as many events as possible because these events are specifically provided for QUEST students. And with that, we would like to leave with a thought to consider: “You get out of QUEST what you put into QUEST.”