I didn’t realize how annoying and tedious booking rooms for an organization could be until I became a student media leader.

Of course I didn’t believe “The Chronicle” would magically show up on the doors of the Carl Hansen Student Center rooms, but I had no idea how challenging it would be to find rooms that work and accommodate our needs.

Our former editor-in-chief, Julia Perkins, sat with me for two hours while I jumped back and forth from the Event Management System (EMS) and DoYouQU to set up our four weekly meetings for each semester.

At first, learning to book rooms was easy. You schedule your events through EMS, pick the room and submit. You can set a recurrence time if your meeting is weekly, so you can book rooms en masse. This is much easier than clicking every week and booking a room.

Event scheduling on DoYouQU was not as easy as one would hope. After the quick transaction on EMS, I was expecting a similar situation.

I was horribly wrong.

It takes twice as much time to fill out DoYouQU events as it does while working with EMS.

There are three problems I have with DoYouQU.

When scheduling your meeting, there is no recurrence button. Instead, you have to click “add another event” for that same meeting and click on the calendar. Then you have to make each time and location match the EMS request, or you could risk being denied the space reservation.

I don’t know if anyone else realizes this, but this takes a long time to do. Especially for me considering I have four meetings that have to be scheduled weekly for each semester.

My next problem involved the descriptions. DoYouQU asks for three different descriptions of your event: an overall description, the purpose of your event and another detailed description.

Every single description I had to write was just a variant of explaining the same thing. This also takes a lot of time to do.

My final problem with DoYouQU are the Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs). It’s not enough to click on what your members are getting out of these meetings, but you have to describe how these ELOs are being applied.

I can understand why ELOs exist. It is important to only schedule events that students benefit from socially and academically. I can understand the need for organization leaders to apply these ELOs.

It is easy enough to look up what these ELOs mean. The Quinnipiac website defines each ELO and there are also buttons on DoYouQU that lead to their definitions.

But it’s tedious to have to explain these ELOs on DoYouQU and how they apply to eachmeeting.

It sucks up a lot of time. Time I don’t have. Time I need to be spending working with my staff to provide the best news content we can for the Quinnipiac community. Time I need to complete my homework and study for tests. Time I need to eat, time I need to sleep and so on.

While I do think it is important to have events that will benefit the students who attend, I think ELOs are unnecessary. If the members of your organization are benefitting from the meetings, it will show in the work they do for the organization. I don’t think it should be mandatory to explain what students will get out of each meeting.

I also think having two systems to schedule events on is counter productive.

It would be beneficial for all organizations to make booking rooms for events a streamlined process. If we have to keep ELOs and we have to include descriptions of our event, we should only have to use one system. Either put it all on DoYouQU or put it all on EMS, because it’s much more confusing to have two different systems and make sure your event times and dates match.

I had so much more to learn from the previous editor-in-chief and this is the one piece of knowledge passed onto me that actually stressed me out.

If event and meeting scheduling was less time consuming and confusing, I think all of the organization leaders would really, really appreciate it.