Top Tier Bash will be held on Nov. 2 in the Endeavor Room from 4-6 p.m. This is an event to celebrate the achievements of student organizations who have achieved Tier 4 and Tier 5 status by attending Student Organization Achievement Recognition (SOAR) workshops, performing community service and doing collaborative events with other organizations on campus.
“Top Tier Bash is pretty much just a big celebration for organizations with pizza, drinks, games and it’s a time to just hang out with them and celebrate what they did the last year,” said Austin Rex, director of outreach and collaboration
The SOAR program is a 5-tiered challenge program aimed towards student organizations. The program helps organizations earn various awards while they work towards their goals. SOAR, led by the House of Representatives in SGA, holds workshops every other week.
Achievements made through the SOAR program are meant to encourage student organizations to reach higher goals. The tier system is an indication of the amount of work an organization has done throughout the semester.
“For Tier 5, it’s 20 hours of service per member for each semester, so 40 hours over the whole year for each member of the organization,” said Rex. “Performing a collaborative event with another organization encourages working with one another instead of just keeping to themselves and coming to our SOAR workshops, which are designed to educate them about how to operate more effectively as an organization.”
Rex explained that the tier system has become more uniform this year.
“Last year it was separated into different tracks for different types of organizations,” Rex said. “Greek organizations had a different track, religious organizations had a different track and social organizations had a different track. But now it’s all uniform, it’s all the same thing, so it’s a lot friendlier to look at and we think that makes it fair for everybody.”
All organizations are welcome to take part in the SOAR program and work towards completing tier challenges.
Plaques are being made for student organizations to be awarded at Top Tier Bash, as well as a banner that will be hung up in the Student Union atrium. Each individual member gets to sign the back of the banner.
“Last year, we had four Tier 4 organizations and this year we have nine, so I’m really excited that a lot of our organizations are seeing this program as something that they should strive towards. I believe it’s a great program to help organizations on campus function better and to work better with each other, so I’m really happy to see how far we’ve come from when we started and how far we’ll go in the future,” said Rex.
