A few months ago, I was standing in line to pick up some free opera tickets, generously provided by the Thomsen Fund, and I realized I was seeing a lot of the same people as the month before … and the month before that as well. The Thomsen Fund provides UTD students with free tickets to fine arts events including symphony, opera, ballet and theater productions, handing out an estimated 3,000 tickets a year, and it is undeniably the best thing UTD does to demonstrate that the world of fine art and culture is truly for everyone. Despite the administrators of the fund trying to make accessibility a priority, information about the program isn’t as publicized as it should be.
Currently, the Thomsen Fund’s main page is hosted on the honors college website, the honors college Instagram is the main social media vehicle for upcoming ticket distributions. To receive notifications about what tickets are available and when, you have to join a Microsoft Teams channel accessible through a link on the Thomsen Fund page. Given this choice of locale, it’s not that surprising that people outside the honors college aren’t aware of the program or don’t realize that all UTD students are eligible to claim tickets.
As an informal experiment, I wanted to see if I could get to the Thomsen Fund page from the UTD homepage without searching for the name of the program, or going directly to the honors college page where I knew it would be. These guidelines were meant to represent the amount of information a student might have if they were looking for student programs or opportunities for exploring the city of Dallas.
I started at the homepage, naively unaware of the odyssey I was embarking on. From there, I went to the header “Campus Life” and clicked on “Culture,” listed under related pages. After skimming through a couple lines about engineers in the anime orchestra and nerds who play sports, I took myself back to “Campus Life” and tried again, going to “Student Services” this time — another dead end. At this point, I decided to try a different tactic and went from “Campus Life” to the Comet Calendar. From there, I clicked on a scheduled visit to the Perot Museum and went to a tag titled “Arts and Culture.” This was another dead end on the ticket front, but I still had faith.
I returned to the UTD website and hovered over the “Info For” button at the very top to get to “Student Information.” This led to a lot of the same links. This time I knew to skip over the red herring of “Campus Life” and tried the organization page, but that led nowhere. I tried the “Info For” tab again, this time going to “DFW Community.” I tried “Fine Arts Events,” which took me to the same listings as the “Arts and Culture” tag on the Comet Calendar. There were some neat events sponsored by the Bass School of Arts and Humanities, but no free tickets in sight. Out of the two off-campus events listed on this page, one was a program by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, but the listing only contained a link to purchase tickets, mentioning nothing about the Thomsen Fund.
At this point I was starting to give up my search. Finally, I bent one of my rules and searched the word “tickets.” The Thomsen Fund page was the sixth result, right below a heading about discounted tickets. Searching “symphony” and “opera” got even better results, putting the Thomsen Fund page at second and fourth respectively. In contrast, when I started at the honors college page, I simply hovered over the “Opportunities” tab and there it was, one click away.
When I started this experiment, I didn’t realize how confusing, time-consuming, and frustrating the search would be. I went to multiple pages, backtracking more often than I went forward, and by the end of it all, I had a headache to match my screen time.
The information has to live somewhere, but I fail to see why that place has to be the honors college alone — somewhere non-honors students have little incentive to visit out of their own volition. The honors college site hosts the Thomsen Fund page, an honors program specialist runs ticket distribution, and the honors college Instagram page posts about upcoming distribution dates. None of this is a problem in itself, but it is counterintuitive that the honors college is the only official source of information about a program meant for all UTD students. It sends a misleading message about the program and the base it serves.
Right now, a student has to already be interacting with honors college material to find the Thomsen Fund page or must hear about the program elsewhere to even know what they should search for. I highly doubt that was the initial intention of the program, nor do I believe it is a purposeful attempt to exclude non-honors students, but the fact remains that a certain subset of students has a much easier time accessing this opportunity than the rest. It’s a frustrating issue with a very simple solution — just put program information out there more consistently and more broadly. The last time ticket distribution showed up as an event on the Comet Calendar was December 2022, and it was the only date posted for the whole year.
Similar trends can be found on social media. When looking through the Thomsen Fund Instagram hashtag, it shows that the only large account that posts about the fund is the honors college, serving 1,843 followers. Comparing that to the Student Government account with 3,170 followers, it appears there are more than a couple students left out of the loop. There’s a simple solution to this as well — if the honors college posts about ticket distribution on Instagram, maybe the Student Government page can repost it, or even better, the Bass School can incorporate distribution dates into their event listings and Instagram feed. Furthermore, these listings and posts should be permanent, not Instagram stories that disappear in a day because, believe it or not, “blink and you’ll miss it” marketing isn’t the best way to inform a broad student base about programs that last longer than a day.
Perhaps the people who read this article or the Thomsen Fund article published in The Mercury last year will be equipped to take advantage of this opportunity, but what about next year? And the year after that? Messaging about ongoing opportunities should be pushed consistently to reach the broadest possible audience and demonstrate the fund’s commitment to accessibility.
The fund program is a credit to UTD, providing students with an opportunity they could scarcely hope to find elsewhere and giving us a chance to better appreciate the bustling city and thriving artistic culture we’re so close to. It can and should be one of our shining stars, recognized as one of the best ways UTD gives back to its students. This is a world of culture right at your fingertips, if only the information about it was a little bit closer to the homepage.
Even if the official marketing doesn’t change, student-led information networks are better than nothing. I strongly encourage returning students to take up the mantle of spreading the word and take advantage of this program when ticket distribution resumes in September. For notifications about what tickets are available and when, make sure to visit the Thomsen Fund page and opt into the Thomsen Fund Tickets channel on Teams.