EventDrops.com, a website created by DePaul student Khoa Nguyen, was created to assist DePaul organizations in their event planning. Recently, however, the website has been a source of controversy with the administration raising objections to it.
Nguyen, a sophomore, started working on the website September of last year after hearing student complaints about OrgSync. Many claimed that it is hard to find events among the website’s other features, so Nguyen wanted to create something devoted solely to events.
“We just want to make it an easy hub, centralized place for DePaul students to just find out about events,” said Nguyen. “As long as the events benefit the students, I don’t care what events they are… I wanted to make EventDrops as simple as possible.”
EventDrops launched January 2012, and the first encounter he had with DePaul administration was after the Winter Involvement Fair. Nguyen asked Assistant Director of Student Involvement Roniciel “Joy” Vergara if the DePaul Activities Board would consider posting events on his website. According to Nguyen, Vergara declined his offer.
“Joy thought that I had somehow hacked or somehow got the system for Campus Connect, the whole login system,” he said. “I told her it’s a totally different system. All I required was (that users) register with their DePaul email address and use their own password.”
Throughout the rest of last year, traffic on EventDrops started to die down, and Nguyen took the opportunity to revamp the website over the summer. At this year’s Involvement Fair, he ran into Vergara again. She told him he was considered a third party and could not promote EventDrops at the fair without paying a fee.