Pictured Above: Aerial Hall, graduate assistant for Leadership and Student Organizations, coordinated the recent Zodiac Leadership event.
Courtesy of Aerial Hall
By Catherine Hicks
Since the beginning of socially distanced events on college campuses, many organizations have struggled to engage students in virtual events. For Leadership and Student Organizations (LSO), the key to solving this problem was astrology.
LSO held the Zodiac Leadership event, a Zoom event that hosted a discussion on the correlation between a specific Zodiac sign and leadership qualities, on Feb. 23.
“It was the most attended leadership event we have held since the start of social distancing,” said Aerial Hall, an LSO graduate assistant and coordinator of the event.
“(LSO) wanted to find an event where we could talk about leadership but make it entertaining,” Hall said. “We wanted to catch the students’ attention and we figured that taking the astrology route would be a unique way to do so.
“Students were divided up in different breakout rooms based on their zodiac element; water, earth, air, or fire. In each breakout room, we had a host go over common traits found in their specific (element) that could affect their leadership style.”
This popularity of astrology is not new.
“Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient,” said Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of J. Walter Thompson’s innovation group, which tracks and predicts cultural trends, in a 2018 article by The Atlantic.
In the same article, Callie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly, said traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.”
Stella Bugbee, the president and editor-in-chief of The Cut, said a typical horoscope post on the site got 150 percent more traffic in 2017 than the year before.
With 18 students and four staff members in attendance, the engagement levels of the Zodiac Leadership were higher than other student events as well.
“Engagement was amazing. Students enjoyed answering questions and providing their own opinions,” Hall said.
Hall shared that he also believes in astrology, and believes it is popular among college students that are looking for an explanation of themselves.
“I’m not saying that it is the sole contributor to who we are as people or in life, but I believe that it is real,” Hall said, “We live in a day and age where we enjoy having an explanation for everything. Astrology gives us an explanation for ourselves. It helps answer questions about our innate feelings/reactions, it helps explain our emotions. I believe college students find comfort in that.”
For students at USF, the belief of astrology isn’t cut and dry. Some people believe in the practice more deeply than others, and some don’t believe in it at all.
Yoanna Shurdha, a sophomore Business Analytics and Information Systems student, believes in parts of astrology but doesn’t believe fully enough to make life decisions off the practice.
“I have always seen those posts on social media that would give traits to zodiac signs, but then during quarantine actually researched it since I had the time to,” Shurdha said, “There (are) parts that I believe in, but I don’t believe in it fully.”
Shurdha shares Hall’s belief that astrology is especially popular among college students.
“A lot of the younger generation isn’t too religious, or they have criticism with the religious communities and structures that are currently in place,” Shurdha said. “I believe that this has led people to turn to different things that they can research and maybe believe in as well since it is more socially acceptable now to not fully adhere to one religion and to be able to explore now as well.”
To Jack Comiskey, a sophomore physics student with a minor in astronomy, the practice of astrology isn’t something to believe in at all.
“With a modern understanding of astronomy we find that astrological beliefs are 100 percent demonstrably untrue. This belief was more excusable before we had the scientific tools to understand the world.” Comiskey said. “We (now) understand that the constellations only look the way they do from the perspective of Earth, as they are 2D shapes made up of stars which are actually lightyears apart in 3D space. They are not related to each other at all, and the constellations are arbitrary.
Comiskey condemns astrology in the face of current scientific methods.
“The idea that the workings of the universe have some mystical bearing on our personal lives is absolutely false, and certainly an egocentric idea,” Comiskey said. “Astronomy is still filled with mysteries and concepts far more incredible and unbelievable than astrology. I think we should focus on studying these instead.”
Dang, Jack really spoke facts.
This Jack Comiskey guy sounds based asf.