Every once in awhile I’ll take a very personal interest in what I’m blogging about. When I saw on Georgia Tech’s official website that the Yellow Jackets were hosting a football clinic for International Students, I said it’s about freaking about time. Let me speak from personal experience, when I was at Georgia Tech, you could literally walk into a computer lab on a Saturday and you would not be aware that Georgia Tech was playing football a few hundred yards away.
This is not an exaggeration.
There is a disconnect in a significant portion of the student body at Georgia Tech that simply doesn’t exist at most other universities especially in the South. With about 15% of the student body hailing from outside the of the United States, that’s a lot of students that probably aren’t familiar with Division 1 athletics.
Consider most of the rest students are engineers as well. I always estimated about half of the students even from the States didn’t care that much about sports.
That’s the way it is at Georgia Tech. If you wanted to have a great time at a football or basketball game you could, but if wanted to completely ignore the game down the street you could do that to. The athletics and academics at Georgia Tech don’t have to be mutually exclusive for these students.
Georgia Tech had an untapped market for potential fans, and this is a good move. I like it. Bring more international students to the games. Get them more interested in sports on campus. Anytime you can increase student attendance at a sporting event, that’s a good thing.
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2 pings
Hokie Mark says:
April 19, 2013 at 9:43 am (UTC -5)
That IS unusual. At Va Tech it wasn’t like that (though I have to admit I was never in the computer lab or any other lab during a VT home football game, so maybe there WERE people there and I just didn’t know it?)
Jfann says:
April 19, 2013 at 11:25 pm (UTC -5)
You’d be on your way to the stadium at Georgia Tech and there would be quite a few students in those labs. Good move to bring some of these international students in.