Hi Stephanie,
We oversee two event spaces in our main campus student center, a third standalone facility on our south campus, and we schedule our quad (in addition to all non-academic scheduling of registrar spaces). These spaces, plus the university chapel are the primary event spaces on campus. There are a couple other but they are scheduled by the school/college within which they're located.
We have a three tiered scheduling priority. 1st priority goes to major university functions such as Homecoming, Family Weekend, Chancellor Initiatives and other large scale programs. 2nd priority goes to registered student organization events. Everything else comes after that. We don't directly book outside clients, anything coming on to campus needs to have an on campus sponsorship separate from out office.
Our fall semester university functions are based on the football schedule and we don't have any annual spring events of that nature that we host. For scheduling student org events we have a Space Allocation process that coincides with our student government's funding process. We collaborate with the chapel on this to give the students a single process. This happen semesterly, usually wrapping up before Thanksgiving in the Fall, and by May in Spring. Once our Student Association announces funding decisions, any event that is funded goes through Space Allocation. Each group has to apply for their preferred dates and provide alternate choices (because most don't look at our calendar to know when homecoming or easter is). After we sort through that, looking at culturally significant dates, organizationally significant dates, as well as additional needs such as rehearsals or extended set up times for outside production vendors, we confirm the dates for all the orgs that applied. Then the calendar opens up to the rest of campus. Academic/Administrative departments and other student orgs who either missed out on the funding process (and need a reservation to qualify for the subsequent funding processes) or are wishing to add a new program.
Typically we only schedule one semester in advance due to our sharing 25Live with the registrar's office (who manages it). As a result any org wishing to use an academic auditorium for a smaller program is required to wait until the registrar has completed the academic schedule for the following semester.
We do have an exception process for departments or organizations that need to bypass our scheduling process, for example our student theatre troupe needs have dates confirmed in order to contract the rights to the show they are wanting to perform. The timeline for that predates our process so they are granted an exception and given a confirmation without going through our scheduling process.
I hope this helps, happy to answer any questions you may have! Our Space Allocation process is currently live so I've included the link to it if you are interested.
https://experience.syracuse.edu/student-centers/reservations/forms/space-allocation/
Scott
Scott Casanova '99
(Pronouns: he/him/his)
Associate Director
Student Centers & Programming Services
T 315.443.4458 F 315.443.4617
srcasano@syr.edu
124 Schine Student Center, 200 Waverly Ave., Syracuse, NY 13244
scps.syr.edu
Syracuse University