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The Indiana Daily Student

LAMP teams adapt to changes for new year

More than 9,000 students are enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Twenty-five years ago, the Liberal Arts and Management Program accepted only 25 of these students each year.

Since then, the program has expanded, accepting about 100 students each year.
That growth shifted the original intentions of LAMP and its programs, President of the Student Advisory Board Sukriti Bansal said.

LAMP is an honors program that synthesizes the liberal arts education in the college with skills taught in the Kelley School of Business, Bansal said.

Students take seminars and classes, such as Global Marketing and Advertising, which combine culture education and business application to make a culturally relevant advertising campaign.

“Employers really like it,” said Adrian Hepfer, vice president of the SAB and communications director for the Virtu Project, one of three LAMP organizations. “You get lots of background and perspectives but obtain basic technical skills.”

The Virtu Project is a program that students can become involved in once they join LAMP. It uses mock investing as a tool to learn more about investment and raise money for a nonprofit, Timmy Global Health, Hepfer said.

While the Vitru Project has had clear goals, the other two programs, the Marketing Team and SAB, are undergoing changes.

Upon realizing they weren’t satisfied with their current situation, students took matters in their own hands.

“If we aren’t satisfied with what we’re doing, we should change what we are doing,” Bansal said.

MTeam is a marketing-focused program that gives students marketing experience as the members work to make LAMP as meaningful a program to students as possible, Wilson explained.

“We use a lot of internal surveys of LAMP students to figure out what courses are liked, what events they want, why they joined,” he said. “We work to get our fingers on the pulse of the program.”

MTeam is the newest of the three programs and has struggled to maintain a model that will best suit LAMP.

“Marketing Team has always known what it wanted to do and the impact it is going to have,” Wilson said. “The challenge has been turning that into a sustainable model for the club and an enjoyable experience for the members.”

This is the first year MTeam has seriously analyzed their internal LAMP student surveys, hoping to improve them to get a better idea of what students want out of the LAMP program, Wilson said.

They also share aspects of marketing with each other, such as interesting ads or YouTube videos, and invite LAMP alumni as speakers to make club meetings more dynamic and fun.

The SAB is the oldest program. Founded in 1999, it has since needed to readjust its function, Bansal said.

The SAB’s original intention was to be a liaison between the students and faculty of LAMP and the administrators, she said.

“The way our classes are structured, a lot depends on discussion, so students have to be interested,” she explained. “We are a lot smaller and closer of a program, so it’s important to have a good forum for discussion and discourse.”

When applying to be on the SAB, Bansal was told it was to be a leadership organization representing the students. That wasn’t what it was, she said.
“It had become more of an event-planning committee,” Bansal said.

After their annual LAMP SAB retreat, members of SAB decided they wanted to return to their original mission and move their focus to a select few initiatives that would improve the LAMP program as a whole.

MTeam plays a large part of that change, Bansal said. It helps gather information about what students want out of the program.

In all, members of the three programs hope the changes they’ve worked hard to create will continue after they leave.

A lot is experimental, Bansal said, but they are “trying to take time to be sure the process works, that it’s sustainable and will be of use to LAMPers into the future.”

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