Behind The Scenes of University Union

By Sara Rizzo – Syracuse, N.Y. (CitrusTV) – Each semester, University Union, a student organization at Syracuse University, chooses celebrity guests to headline events on campus.

Its latest guest, Antoni Porowski from Queer Eye, came to campus to perform a cooking demonstration and to take questions from the audience.

The Performing Arts Co-Directors for UU are in charge of choosing these guests. Talia Levy, one of the co-directors, says they receive a lot of student-input during the process.

“At our shows and tabling sessions, we’re constantly surveying students,” Levy said. “Based on budgets and ideas, we’ll come up with a short list of people that we think students might be interested in, that might be really topical right now. And then based off that, we’ll open it up to the students.”

Jenna Levine, the other co-director for UU, says they use the surveys from students, and then see which guests are available to come to campus.

“We’re using our data from the surveys to correspond with agencies to see what—who’s available first of all, what kind of event we’re looking for,” Levine said. “Once the contracts and offers are all accepted, the things come kind of internally and we work within the University Union team.”

In the past, UU has brought celebrity guests such as Jenny Slate, Aparna Nancherla, Hasan Minaj, TJ Miller, The Lucas Brothers and Chelsea Handler. Levine says Porowski’s event is different from most of these other events.

“It’s a different format then we’re generally done,” Levine said. “We were really excited about the opportunity to have a live cooking demonstration, especially one that was so tailored toward college students.”