Because of time constraints, only half the film was shown, but students were then encouraged to buy the film in order to support the filmmakers. Although Flee is animated, it is shot as a traditional documentary, including  confessionals by Amin intercut along with B-rolls of his daily life, flashbacks from his childhood, and real footage of the events covered in the film.

The event was on the smaller side with a turnout of around 15 people, but it was an overall success. The film’s reception was overwhelmingly positive, leading to an engaging discussion on its animated medium, compared to more traditional formats.

Media Night and other events included in Undocuweek are a way for OUI to offer a space where students can connect over shared interests. 

“It brings in a supportive community where we all get to converse and connect,” College first-year Jasmine Gonzalez said. 

Flee was not just moving, but also an educational experience. The educational aspect of Media Night is especially important because, despite hosting fascinating and meaningful events, OUI does not have a large presence on campus. The matter of OUI’s small reach goes deeper than just awareness. According to College third-year Angelina Martinez, an OUI board member, Oberlin’s administration has historically not been adequately supportive of undocumented students.

“A big issue is with financial aid,” Martinez said. Sometimes people will miscatalog people, … and then people in the [Office of] Financial Aid themselves aren’t very educated on certain terms.”

Although OUI has been able to make tremendous strides in getting support from the administration and creating a safe space for undocumented students, what they really need in order to achieve their goals is support from the student body. 

“I hope to see more people at our meetings, just coming to our events, showing support in our events, and just being there for our community members,” Martinez said. 

With events such as Media Night, OUI hopes to draw in more people in order to educate students about issues faced by undocumented students at Oberlin and in general, as well as to garner support for their causes. So far, OUI has made efforts to get the word out about their meetings and events through flyers or their Instagram, but Martinez says they still are not receiving the support they need in order to accomplish their goals. 

“Oberlin … claims to be activists and big on social change, but that’s not very evident for marginalized groups who push for change,” Martinez said. “You can see that in who attends these meetings. … It’s usually only those who have [a] direct stake, and that’s not what it should be.”

OUI has been doing everything it can to try to educate and gain support from the student body. The responsibility lies with students to support them.

As I listened to some of their hit songs while hastily making my way over on Saturday, I was immediately struck by the trill of the lead singers’ voices. This was especially clear in their most popular song, “I Wanna Prove to You,” in which the singers repeatedly croon the same lyric. Despite my slight aversion to their vocals, I could see how their upbeat sound, which clearly had passion behind it, would make for a lively concert experience.

I arrived right when the show began, and as the band came on, I could tell my prediction was correct: unlike the overpowering droning of the vocals in their recorded tracks, the D’Addarios had pleasant voices which meshed well with the talent of the additional members of their touring band, Danny Ayala on bass and Reza Matin mainly on drums. With the band, The Lemon Twigs were able to create a much more holistic sound. It felt less like vocals over a track and more like separate pieces of a whole coming together.

An essential part of The Lemon Twigs experience was watching how they were able to engage the audience. At the beginning of the set during “The One” and “In My Head,” students were still trickling in. However, even after about 10 minutes into the show, there wasn’t much of a dynamic between band and audience. It seemed like Oberlin was skeptical. Maybe they were all thinking what I was thinking — Is this band any good? Or is it just another variation of every other indie rock group with sub-500,000 Spotify listeners? Students are known to have high standards for what they consider to be good music, but they’re also known to keep an open mind and take advantage of all the opportunities to hear free live music provided to them.

It seemed that The Lemon Twigs were picking up on this apprehension and somewhat contributing to it themselves. For the first half of their set, the band performed stiffly and didn’t often address the audience between songs. There was a mutual unsureness between audience and performer, with The Lemon Twigs appearing uncomfortable with Oberlin and Oberlin not knowing if they were spending their Saturday at the right place.

However, about halfway through the set, there started to be a noticeable vibe change, in large part due to bassist and singer Brian D’Addario. When not singing, D’Addario started to loosen up with the crowd, jumping around, kicking his legs up, and coming up to audience members in the front rows and playing right at their cameras. D’Addario earned a loud cheer from the audience every time he interacted with them without fail.

As audience and band developed a rapport with each other, the quality in music started to increase as well. There was a particular shift after they played “I Wanna Prove to You” and then introduced themselves with a little back and forth with the audience. After that halfway point, the enthusiastic head bopping of the audience spread beyond just those in the front row, the cheering after each song became increasingly louder, and in return, The Lemon Twigs’ passion which had been so present in their recorded tracks started to appear live as well.

By the end of the set the crowd was fully invested, with the final two songs on the setlist, “Rock Dreams” and “Leather Together” getting nearly the whole room dancing along. It was jarring going from the high energy of the closing song to the band’s awkward goodbye when they left before the animated cheers of the audience had died down.

As I left, what stuck with me most was not the music I had listened to but the feeling of observing the relationship between crowd and band grow so much over the course of just ninety minutes. The Lemon Twigs proved to the audience that they were more than just a pair of brothers whose dad is hyperlinked on their Spotify page. Instead, because they could actually engage with their audience, concert-goers were able to get over their skepticism and enjoy the sound and energy of musicians embracing their passion

“If a club or a group has Instagram, it feels so much more professional and real,” College second-year Sage Reddish, former manager of @oberlin_sosha, said. 

Survivors of Sexual Harm & Allies uses their Instagram as a digital, hyper-specific bulletin board. The majority of their posts are posters announcing events, with very few actual photos scattered throughout. The job of SOSHA’s social media manager is mainly to create Canva designs whenever the club needs to make an announcement or advertise an event.

That does not mean running an Instagram account is just slapping some text on a background and calling it a day. In order to seem professional, accounts have to maintain an aesthetically cohesive and pleasing image. 

“I would just go to Canva and then make a little Instagram post,” Reddish said. “It usually takes about 20 minutes, [but] sometimes when you have a ton of homework it can also be a lot.” 

College second-year Max Lang commented on the process for making posts. 

“It does get demanding, because graphic design kind of stuff can take a lot of time,” Lang, manager of @oberlin_equestrian and @oberlinobertones, said. “Sometimes the ideas come to me faster than others, but sometimes it does take a good minute for me to get a poster together or member profile together.”

Not everyone’s experience is uniform. For one thing, established organizations tend to have a bigger team working on the account. While Lang is one of only two people logged into the Obertones’ Instagram and is the only one actively posting, College second-year Maja Saveva, who manages @thecatinthecream, has a different experience.

“The Cat has a few social media managers, although the roles are not super specific or set, so we kind of split the work amongst each other,” Saveva said. 

Furthermore, for a business like the Cat in the Cream, which is already well-known and loved by students regardless of its Instagram presence, less effort has to be put into maintaining an engaged audience online.

“The Cat only uses Instagram to post our posters, and we don’t really check our stats,” Saveva said. Meanwhile, Lang said they do use some of Instagram’s engagement features “to gauge what people are really interacting with.” 

Lang is in a unique position as the manager of @oberlin_equestrian. Unlike many of Oberlin’s popular student organizations, Canva designs are almost entirely absent from @oberlin_equestrian, with the exception of their two most recent posts. In fact, besides their two posts announcing ’23–24 leadership, the account has been dormant for nearly a year, making it so Lang not only has to run their social media, but also revive it from the dead and bring it up to par with other accounts.

This dormancy is not a result of poor social media management. 

“During COVID … there was just not a lot of team activity at all,” Lang explained. “Even last year, I was on the team, but we maybe went to one show.” However, an active Instagram is an essential part of the team’s comeback: “Now that the team is ramping up to pre-COVID levels, I’m trying to get the social media back to what it was as well,” Lang said.

It has only been in the past few years that student organizations have had a social media presence, with even the bigger accounts such as @thecatinthecream not starting theirs until 2017. The dependence on posters versus Instagram varies depending on how well-established the organization already is.

In regards to SOSHA, Reddish believes that Instagram serves an important role for a club’s outreach. “Instagram is going to be more effective, I think it catches people’s attention a little bit more,” Reddish said. “I think posters can sometimes go unnoticed. If you’re looking at someone’s story or feed, that’s really noticeable.”

While social media may be a good foundation for marketing and awareness, for Oberlin’s organizations with a broader target audience, it may take some more time before digital catches on.

Regardless of how information is spread most effectively, or how much goes into a club’s Instagram, social media is here to stay as a staple of outreach. With social media, students can now curate what clubs they see information for, rather than hoping they happen upon a poster of something they find intriguing. They have a new medium to discover organizations they may not have seen otherwise.