Winter quarter for SCC has officially started as new students from all around the world gathered in their new second home where they would pursue their education and meet new faces. Student Life put on a welcoming week from Jan. 8 to Jan. 12 featuring a variety of events and activities. For the peak of the event, Student Life orchestrated a delightful surprise for a frosty winter evening: an Ice Skating night.
The free event was held on Friday night, Jan. 12, at the Kraken Community Iceplex, Northgate Students could get there by either driving their personal vehicle or making use of the provided shuttles that were running back and forth from the skating rink and the campus.
The Ebbtide interviewed a couple of SCC students who were partaking that day and asked what they had to say.
Akane Nakayama, a student from Japan, mentioned how she enjoyed the event even though the rink was very crowded.
“In my country, I skated like five times or something like that, but this skating (in Seattle) is the first time for me,” she shared.
Another student from Indonesia, Russell Akbar Dhuhian, who just enrolled in SCC, also enjoyed the gathering. He has skated several times, stating that this is his “10th time (skating).”
However, the event ran into some trouble along the way. Too many people showed up, and as a result, they had to start limiting the amount of SCC students that could enter the rink.
“We haven’t done anything like this before and so we had no idea of how many folks we would have,” said Sundi Musnicki, director of Student Life. “We were expecting the turnout for the first time to be lower, and then in addition to that with the weather, we’re just thinking that (not as many students) would show up.”
Musnicki further explained that the original capacity promoted for the rink was 300, as such, they thought that there was going to be “a ton of room.” She noted that, in addition to SCC students, the ice rink needed to be able to accommodate walk-ins.
“In the future, one of the things we’ve learned is that we’ll take registration early,” Musnicki said. “We may end up doing a cap for the first so many people. The other thing that we’ve talked about is potentially reserving the ice privately; so we would just book the space and that would be all Shoreline students so we could fill up the whole capacity. Those are some of the things that we’ve talked about.”
“Because I think this proves that this is popular, it’s not ideal that we had to, unfortunately, tell some students we couldn’t let them in, but if we decided to do it again, which I do expect that we might, those are things that we’ll think about for next time,” Musnicki said
