Taylor Meredith/Catalyst
The Counseling and Wellness Center will be offering tours during the Expo.
“To live a healthy lifestyle you have to be happy,” second-year and New College Student Alliance (NCSA) co-president Mike Long said. “And what do puppies do? They make you happy.”
The puppies Long was referring to, courtesy of the Humane Society, will be running around during the Fitness and Fun Expo taking place outside the Counseling and Wellness Center (CWC) on Nov. 2 from 1-5 p.m..
The expo, which is a joint project between the student governments at both New College and the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, is meant to help promote the CWC and its services. “We realized a lot of our students aren’t taking full advantage of the center,” Long said. “Some don’t even know it exists and some just don’t realize what exactly it offers.”
During the expo students are encouraged to tour the center in order to meet the staff and gather information on the counseling and medical services provided there.
There were additional goals in mind when it came to planning the expo. The entire day is meant to help teach students about healthy living in general. “We’ve been planning this for three and a half months,” Long said. “I think we’ve thought about every aspect of healthy living.”
With an estimated 45 vendors who plan on being in attendance, it certainly seems that way. Condoms (for both men and women) will be passed out, and there will be a bus providing STD and HIV testing with fifteen minute results. Dieticians from Complete Nutrition will sit and talk about dietary needs for different types of vegetarian and omnivore diets, and even the choice of food for the eating contest is a healthy one: salad.
If salad isn’t quite your thing, there will be plenty of other food beforehand in the massive free food fair taking place in Hamilton “Ham” Center. The fair will go from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and will be made up of over 20 vendors. All of these vendors have the potential to form contracts with Sodexo, so if students like a particular vendor’s food, it just may end up incorporated in Ham on a regular basis.
After the food fair, if students still need a snack, they can find some free ice cream donated by TCBY outside the CWC.
Food aside, there will be an abundance of activities to participate in, such as riding a mechanical bull shark, climbing a rock wall and listening to the live music played by several New College bands, including New Cats, the student jazz club and performing band.
There will also be no shortage of free items being given away, such as t-shirts from the Bloodmobile, gift baskets from the bookstore, raffles from Fit2Run and a skydiving trip from Tandem Skydive.