Miguel Gomez, second from right, and Uniiculture team
By Miguel Gomez ’16
Senior majoring in B.S. Astrophysics; Vice President of the International Student Union; promotional coordinator of the Multicultural Center; and Uniiculture founder
Uniiculture is a social platform to bridge the gap between communities (e.g. International, Social Justice/Activist, Greek Life, Sports, Arts & Media, etc.).
Throughout my undergrad years, I have witnessed a major problem in many international events. On the day of the events, I only saw the target audience (international community) and not a lot of domestics students or families from the Athens community. I wanted to change this, so last spring semester I came up with this idea. The idea not only was going to bring the Ohio University and Athens community together, but also changed the way we engaged in a specific topic or community.
A lot of organizations in general use social media, emails, fliers, and word of mouth to promote their events. On the day of the event, they look around and see their target audience. At the next events, they see their target audience again. If this repeats, then there is a problem. If the organization’s goal was to reach as many people with different backgrounds, then they didn’t do a great job at promoting it. There are three reasons for this: 1. People are busy. 2. People don’t care, and you can’t change their minds. 3. They can’t relate to it, and if they can’t relate to it they have no purpose of going.
Right now on the Uniiculture website, the international community is live. Meaning if you are interested about the Ghanaian culture. You go on this website, search Ghana, and it shows you the Ghana community. On that page, you will see events, organizations, and news that are related to Ghana. If you have a question to that community (for example: what is your fav Ghanaian food?), anyone can answer it. In addition, if you want to know about work/study programs in Ghana, you can ask that question.
Coming Next Week: Social Justice & Activist Community
Next week we are releasing the Social Justice & Activist community. It will be a place where anyone can speak their mind about any university or personal issues anonymously or not anonymously. On this page, students, faculty, and staff can publish their story. In addition, they can add events, organizations, news, resources, and Q&As. The goal for this community is to allow anyone to feel like they are apart of the university and local community.
We launched Oct. 5, 2015, and we plan to expand to Iowa State University in mid-November. You need an ohio.edu email to signup. (We are going to change this so that anyone can see the content without a university email and you can only submit anything with university email.)
We participated in the Startup weekend at the Innovation Center last weekend. Although we didn’t win, I found a team and made a lot of connections with people in the tech industry.
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