Marquette Student Government will send students on a scavenger hunt for University President the Rev. Robert A. Wild starting Friday.
Not the real Wild, however.
MUSG is sponsoring "Where's Wild-O," a competition to promote an open forum with Wild, Provost Madeline Wake and Senior Vice President Gregory Kliebhan.
The forum will be held Nov. 10 at 4:30 p.m. on the first floor of the Alumni Memorial Union.
MUSG will place a cardboard cutout of Wild somewhere on campus and move it periodically. When students spot it, they can go to MUSG's Web site, submit contact information and where they saw the cutout, and enter to win one of several prizes, including the grand prize of an iPod Nano.
Students can enter once a day and must be present at the forum to win a prize.
"We try to put an activity with it, an incentive to actually be at the forum," said Alex Hermanny, president of MUSG and a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences.
"I would probably go to win the Nano, but if I'm there I might as well ask questions," said Joel Volkert, a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. He said a concern for him is the reasoning behind dorm visitation hours and the prohibition of overnight visitors to the dorms on certain weekends.
The forum occurs once per semester and is designed to give students "as many answers right away as possible," Hermanny said.
Twenty-fiveHto 50 people typically show up for the forum, Hermanny said, depending on the presence of pressing issues within the university. He said discussion topics range from residential life and tuition costs to public safety issues.
"Not everyone asks questions, but people are there to hear the answers," Hermanny said.
Laura Herzing, MUSG communications vice president and a senior in the College of Communication, said MUSG posted "teasers" last week to "generate buzz" about the event in hopes that students would pay more attention to the informative second round of posters, which went up earlier this week.
"Hopefully from this promotion we'll get more students to show up and get better questions," Herzing said.
MUSG's advertising budget funds posters and prizes for Where's Wild-O, Herzing said.
She said the idea for Where's Wild-O stemmed from last fall's promotion that included a similar cardboard cutout in the John P. Raynor, S.J. Library.
"While the numbers might have been a little bit higher (last fall), I don't know how much we can say was the cutout," Hermanny said. "I think that people thought the cutout was cool just in general, but I'm not sure if they related it to the event."