Weekend Activities of Middlesex

Pros and cons of the current Weekend schedule

Middlesex has offered a plethora of weekend activities for students which can be found in the official “Weekend Schedule” website, or, more recently, announced via Reach email. As a result, every Middlesex student is familiar with these offerings.

Every weekend, Middlesex offers certain activities for students (unsurprisingly called the “Weekend Activities”). Some of these are present every time (e.g. Church Van), but others are more periodic (van to Boston). However, sign-ups are only available for certain predetermined time slots, making some of the activities impossible for students with multiple commitments to sign up for. The activities offered on Saturdays are especially inconvenient for students with athletic commitments. For example, the van to Natick Mall used to be 2 pm-5pm on Saturdays, meaning that people with a packed athletic schedule were unable to attend the mall trip each week. Thankfully, mall times have been changed to Sundays, making it more convenient for many students.

Criticism of Activities

Although the majority of the activities are already great, there is still room for improvement. For example, many students have been advocating for more supermarket trips (Trader Joe’s and H-Mart in particular), as trips to these stores are quite rare as of now. Also, students have been calling for more trips into Boston — I’ve heard many tales about students having to find their own sources of transportation there, mainly in the form of Uber. Especially for adolescent high school students, ubering alone can be dangerous— not to mention expensive. If Middlesex were to provide shuttles that made weekly trips to these destinations, this problem would easily be solved. Finally, an increased variety of events would be interesting. Some suggested activities are trips into different parts of Concord (not just the regular Town Shuttle one) and most importantly, Target.

Suggestions for improvement

Aside from the comments above, I also recommend that the school allows students to take more control in terms of making their own ideal weekend activities. One way this could be achieved would be through sending out forms to measure the level of satisfaction, create a suggestion slot for activities, provide a space for questions and comments, etc. Also, the current activities spreadsheet doesn’t include a slot that indicates the rendezvous point for pickup, so adding that section could help lessen some confusion. 

Conclusion

Weekend Activities have been relatively satisfactory so far and have improved considerably since the start of the school year. However, certain things are still in the works— a need for more grocery stores and Boston trips in particular. In addition to these proposed improvements, I believe the school should create weekly weekend activities-based forms to allow students to take initiative in improving the Weekend Activities, as well as provide pickup locations on the current weekend activities sheet.

Morgan Kim