GCSU wins 2011 RSA conference bid

GCSU has officially received the bid to hold next year’s Georgia Residence Hall Organizations annual conference. The Residence Student Association will be hosting the conference during the spring semester of 2011.

According to RSA president Katie Dunn, a junior psychology major, RSA submitted a bid to host the conference next year and presented it at the past GRHO conference this spring semester that was held at Georgia Southwestern.

“The bid consists of everything we are hoping to have for the conference, like food, hotels, the activities, those sequence of programming,” Dunn said. “You write the bid, you show up and present it and usually there’s other people there presenting against you and then in a boardroom they discuss pros and cons of the school hosting. We ended winning the bid process by them saying there were a lot of pros.”

Melissa Reynolds, a freshman pre-biology major and RSA delegate, believes the conference provides a great way to meet other RSA delegates from different universities and is also a good opportunity for students to share their ideas with one another.

“At the conference we go to the program sessions that can range from icebreakers to leadership to how to run a meeting,” Reynolds said.” We take the things we learn during the sessions and bring them back to campus to share all we learned to help others, as well as ourselves.”

However, Reynolds said the conference doesn’t just consist of programs sessions for students to attend, there is also some fun involved.

“There is usually a dance one of the nights and some fun activities that happen throughout the conference. The first day we get there is really about showing off your school and cheering,” Reynolds said.

The GRHO conference consists of many other components. The hosting school creates a theme for the conference, provides entertainment and activities and also raises money for a specific philanthropy of its choice.

The upcoming GRHO conference theme is “GRHO Green.”

“We decided to pick it because there is a very big movement within our campus to push towards a more green environment,” Dunn said. “We are starting our own recycling organization basically we are revamping everything we have ever thought about recycling we are going to build it from scratch and make it work on campus.”

The philanthropy chosen for the conference is the Arbor Day Foundation. This philanthropy gives each university attending the conference an opportunity to contribute money toward a certain cause.

“Any school can raise money in any way they want. Most will probably take a piece of their RSA/RHA budget and put it towards the donation of trees for the Arbor Day Foundation. We will simply make a big donation in the name of GRHO to the Arbor Day Foundation,” Dunn said.

According to the RSA written bid for the GRHO conference, the philanthropy will also include the opportunity for each school to purchase an “Ornamental Seedling Package” from the Georgia Forestry Commission. The package will contain 25 trees in total. The trees offered are dogwoods, crepe myrtles and redbuds.

Barbara Frazier, a junior business major and program chair, said they have planned to provide entertainment for the students attending the conference.

“We are planning to have the Den open for the participants to play the Xbox, pool tables, darts, poker tables, and just chill out in the room with the massage chairs, Frazier said.” “We are also planning to maybe have a movie playing in one of the rooms upstairs and also maybe a dance in another room.”

The GRHO conference will be held at GCSU usually during the last weekend of January 2011. RSA delegates put a lot of hard work into making their bid what it needed to be.

“I’m very excited! We put so much effort into this and it is going to be so much fun,” Reynolds said.

Posted by Lauren Davidson on Feb 26 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry