Discussion: New College Club?

I have it from a reliable source that on Wednesday there will be an organizational meeting for a new campus club at the University of Illinois, the Orienteering Illini.

I hope something comes of it. I should know by the end of the week whether I'll need to navigate the reliable source's bedroom to find her shoes, gaiters, compass and SI card, in order to mail them to her.

I realize this is a premature post. I just figured it would be nice if everyone held a good thought.

I hear that college students in Georgia are thinking along the same lines.

I had extensive involvement with student organizations during and after my college years. Even thought it's been 40 years, I doubt things have changed much, in the sense that it's tough to get a successful club off the ground, let alone perpetuate it.

Thought about trying this myself in Michigan. Then found out intercollegiates are only for <28 yrs old...grad students like me in lower 30's unwelcome, motivation instantly crushed. At least the Gamma Theta Upsilon took me...

On a more positive less disgruntled note, I mapped Western Michigan University campus a little over a year ago and had an o-event on campus, it was my first mapping project ever so it was pretty amateur, but the students that tried it had a blast, some even got extra credit in their geog class, and it was easy to publicize. I think the student clubs are a great way to go, definitely should go for it. Utilize the student geography club, GTU, geog dep't, etc, all were helpful and motivated in my on-campus event. These days the support for student organizations seems outstanding, at least at Univ of Mich and Western Mich. Lots of resources available for starting new clubs and getting them going, there is a lot that can be leveraged to develop the sport at the college level. Maybe when I get a professorship and get over my disgruntledness over the age discrimination I'll start one up :)

For integration with college campuses, I think a great move would be to approach the residence halls. As a former dorm VP at a large university, I know that the res halls are always looking for active social events, they usually have budgets to cover many events, and they have a very large captive audience that they can market to.

If I still had a connection with a university, I'd approach the res halls to put on a series of free campus adventure runs, and have the first one be soon after the kids get on campus. Having a fun run with a bunch of freshmen would be a great way for them to learn the ins and outs of the campus. You could have dorms compete against other dorms, floors against floors, or whatever. Encourage teams, mass start, score-o (with either flags or Q&A). Bam, great social activity for the kids, and great exposure for the local orienteering club, who might get a % of the kids to come out for regular club events.

If you approach the res hall exec board and basically say "Hey, we've got a ready-made event, we'll do all the work, it'll be great for campus orientation and team building, all you have to do is cover the map printing."

One thing to consider would be the $1 O-USA start fee per person. If the event is organized by the orienteering club, then you'd be responsible for $1 per person. I don't remember how the insurance/liability works for campus events, but if the event is officially a university event, then maybe you wouldn't have to pay the start fees? Worst case, you'd either have to charge each kid $1, or have either the res hall or o' club cover the cost.

Targeting just the geography students will get you some "quality" students, but targeting the res halls will get you "quantity" students.

You're probably insured well if you are putting on an official university event, so there's no reason for the club/student organization to bother with joining Orienteering USA or paying the $1 fee. The privilege of organizing orienteering events is not limited to clubs of Orienteering USA.

I will be driving past there pretty soon so I could stop in to see whats going on and give some advice and ideas if someone wants to hook me up with some contact info.

Hopefully I'll have more details in a few days. Erin, is your email still at syr.edu?

The daughter of a former student of mine is attending U of Illinois and running circles around the other Big Ten girls in middle distance events. She is typical of the prototype for a future star in orienteering - bright, motivated to train, near her peak in Athletics, a year from now she'll be looking for other challenges. Plant a seed and invite her to join the club.
(Her dad was a star sprinter and football player. I never could get him to come orienteering)

Email me at erinschirm@gmail.com. Will be at the U of Ill on Monday/Tuesdays and could stay maybe till Wednesday but I could meet up with people and talk maybe Tuesday. So let me know asap. Thanks.

Umm, would staying till Wednesday leave enough time to get to the WIOL race on Saturday?

I think college students could be a very productive demographic for recruiting.

Every year, ~60k 18-year-olds (men and women) head off to a 4 year college who competed in cross-country in high school, but are not running for their college team.

One other plus that came to mind about college campuses is the GIS office usually has outstanding spatial data that they often will share if you want to map the campus for a sprint that the university approves. Its some of the best basemap data around...even the trees are mapped at a lot of campuses! And many college campuses of course have awesome settings for something like a sprint course.

Yes. I am trying to start an orienteering club in the University of Illinois. The club is now called Orienteering Illini (OI). I think one major reason of starting this club is to inform students that orienteering is a fun activity. Moreover, within 4 hours of driving, there are 4 orienteering clubs around us (CAOC, IRVOC, ICO, SLOC), so we can have a lot of orienteering activities.

I am now trying to make a couple of sprint maps in the campus area. Hopefully we can use it after Fall 2013 semester starts and use it to promote orienteering to college students. This is my first time to make an orienteering map, so any guidance will be appreciated.

Great!! Definitely get good basemap data. That makes a world of difference, and the college should have some excellent data. For example at WMU every distinguishable tree was mapped in their base map data! There was so much helpful data I was actually simplifying what they gave me after bringing it into OCAD, not adding. Even still it took me many more days than I thought it would take, so be sure to give yourself more time than you think you need. Since you don't need to use it for an event until fall this is a perfect time to get started.

If there are data on tree locations in our campus, that would be great! Currently I know where to get LIDAR contour data in Champaign county. I use Google map to obtain the geometry and relative locations of buildings and roads.

I have one question about using OCAD: is there any easier way to import LIDAR / tree data to OCAD? So far I just manually trace the contours (which is not too bad because UI is mostly flat).

Can you get the lidar data in point cloud form? That is, in an LAS format? (There are other acceptable formats as well.) Typically the government-calculated contours are not as good as those processed specifically for orienteering.

Depending on what version of OCAD you have, what format the base data is in, and what software you have available, there are various ways to import contours. But they are not super easy and generally involve changing your data from one format to another.

For your purposes, I would guess that tracing them by hand is the easiest and best way to get started. Even if you can import contours by computer, you will have to do lots of manual corrections, especially with LIDAR in a flat campus area. The direct import becomes more useful in hilly terrain.

I would also say to keep the map simple. ISSOM is cool and all that, but you would be surprised that you can set decent orienteering courses just with some pretty simple maps. Campus facilities maps, trail maps with some rough contours, etc...

cedarcreek: The following link is where I got the LIDAR contour data. It is in LAS format.

http://www.isgs.illinois.edu/nsdihome/webdocs/ilhm...

blegg: Thank you for your advice! I am following ISSOM to draw the map because it is cool for the first-timers to get an impression on how an orienteering map looks like. I hope the map can serve as a promotion of orienteering on campus, since not too many people have heard of orienteering in my experience.

Having more college competitors is a great thing. Plans are being made for the 2014 Intercollegiates which is the selection race for the World University Orienteering Champs. WUOC is held every even year and will be held in July 2014 in the Czech Republic. College students prepare!

For small projects, you can use LAStools to process the raw data (for anything serious, you should talk to the coder about licensing). I find this useful for ensuring precise contour intervals when I'm doing serious mapping. However, I've generally found it very difficult to improve significantly on the pre-generated contours where I live.

Looks like the pregenerated contours you have are ERSI shapefiles. With my old version of OCAD, I need DXF or AI files (Newer versions of OCAD can handle more formats). For awhile I had access to ArcGIS and converted to AI, but now I do the conversion using MassGIS DXF Author. You can also do conversion using free programs like QGIS. Again, I think hand-tracing is good enough for your first maps. But those tricks may be useful for you in the future.

I've definitely gotten lots of impressed comments from college students about the ISSOM maps I've made.... but man they take a lot of work to maintain.

I made one campus map way back when, and getting the campus building plans in digital (vector) format was a huge help. I got them from the gardener.

The IL lidar is of very high quality. I've made several basemaps in north central and NW IL with it. I think they used SCMODS to collect it :) How's that for a movie reference, Nev?

Grr accidently deleted my post while trying to make it sound less snarky, but it was something about college clubs and Moneyball and market inefficiencies.
One of my favourite movies Eddie, have yourself an Orange Whip

And a piece of dry toast.