After graduating high school, Patrick Berry worked successfully on Wall Street, returned to college for his degree, jumped back into work for a publishing company and then attended graduate school before finally becoming a professor.

Berry, an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University, led a life his students never knew about, said Johnathan McClintick, a senior English and textual studies and writing and rhetoric dual major.

McClintick and five other members of the Writing Program Student Organization — to which Berry is the faculty adviser — learned about Berry’s life over a lunch sponsored by the Student Association’s Chat & Dine program.

“While I regularly meet with students out of class, the event was different in that it provided an informal space to meet over a meal,” Berry said in an email. “It was fun for me and I suspect for students as well.”

Launched in January, the program encourages engagement between students and faculty or staff members in a setting that’s not necessarily academic. SA President Boris Gresely said he discovered the idea from the University of Rochester, which is considered a peer institution of SU. Berry’s group is just one of Chat & Dine’s 58 applications it received this semester. SA will stop accepting applications for this semester at 11:59 p.m. this Friday.

The program began slowly, but has rolled since placing “SU Chat & Dine” business cards with information on how to sign up in all the academic resource centers on campus. Twenty-two percent of the applications came between the last week of February and the first week of March, the timeframe of card distribution, said Aysha Seedat, the director of student life for SA.

Chat & Dine has approved 47 of 58 applications and denied four more because they were graduate students. Because of how the program is funded, only undergraduates are covered, Seedat said. Six applications are pending because they are one-on-one lunches. Seedat said she sent emails asking if the applicants could invite a few more people because the goal is to have small groups of two to four people with the faculty or staff member.

The program received $3,000 in funding from the Student Advancement Fund in November 2014 to pay for the meals — each person is allowed one entrée, a drink and either an appetizer or dessert — but hasn’t spent it all.

“I would say maybe that we’re at the halfway point,” Seedat said of the $3,000. Any additional funding will go back into the Student Advancement Fund, she added.

Other unsettled plans are how the reservations will be logged. This semester, Seedat used a form accessible through only her MySlice. Seedat said there have been some mix-ups with unscheduled lunches because she is the only person with access to the submitted forms, but a phone call has solved the problem each time and the lunches have occurred.

Planned changes include transitioning to a Google Doc for registration and an alteration in hours for the lunches, which are now Tuesdays and Fridays, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Seedat will present the numbers and student feedback on Chat & Dine at either the April 20 or April 27 SA meeting.

Gresley, whose term as SA president will end this semester, said he is optimistic about Chat & Dine’s future.

“At the end of the semester, we’ll look at (Chat & Dine) metrics and say, do we need to scale this program further or smaller?” he said. “It looks to me like we’ll need it to be bigger.”

Published on April 8, 2015 at 9:44 pm

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