Only three years ago we had “Return to Glory,” the modern publicity disaster that stemmed from advertising naivety and the misunderstandings of event promotion and management. The event promised to “bring back TechFest in all of its glory; to bring back some of its allure,” according to Teddy Poppe, the SGA President at the time. It did anything but that. A rave, a DJ, some “fun” events, and thousands of dollars suddenly down the drain. Students complained and complained, and yet the event still garnered high praise from the administration. I hoped that future leaders would learn from these mistakes, seek to improve and actually bring back the glory of Stevens and its student leaders, and create better events and better programming. And then there was R.A.G.E.
The idea of R.A.G.E. made sense: scale down the big events, and put the focus on the numerous student organizations on campus. And I liked this idea, because it related to the bigger problem: what is my Student Activity Fee really worth spending on, and more importantly, what is my time outside of classes really worth spending on?
As a student, an SGA senator, a Teaching Assistant, and even a teacher at other schools, I have pondered a number of important questions about extra-curricular activities. What is a good “student life”? What events and activities should students have an opportunity to participate in at Stevens? What purpose do these activities serve for the betterment of the Stevens degree and community? Time and time again my answer to this question is the same: extra-curricular events should teach students non-academic skills that will help them in the future and make them a better person, a better Stevens student, and, eventually, alumnus. Leadership, event and project management, publicity and public relations, and more: these are all skills students can learn in their clubs and other organizations. But these skills do not come naturally; they require instruction, practice, intuition, and trial and error. This is something I have personally learned through organizing my own events (the Castle Point Anime Convention in particular) over the past four years. And this is something that was entirely apparent in R.A.G.E. 2015, in how it was organized, in how it was publicized, and in the content and programming it contained.
An event has a number of distinct divisions: the scheduled programming, publicity and public relations for the event, and finally the actual internal operations for making the event happen. I do not have the space in this letter to go into too much detail, but I want to elaborate on how R.A.G.E. failed in every one of these categories, and managed to effectively waste thousands of dollars in SGA money on something nobody asked for.
The first disappointment was R.A.G.E. itself. Throughout the entire week, only 10 RSOs held events (not counting the two additional RSO events that were held independently of R.A.G.E.), supplementing the 13 other events hosted by the R.A.G.E. committee. When more than half of the events are not hosted by clubs, it defeats the original mission statement, and provides a small drop of “experience” in the red and gray pool of over 100 RSOs that exist at Stevens. However, I will not focus too much on the lack of programming because the RSO events that were held were not bad (probably because the R.A.G.E. committee was not directly organizing them), and the real problems with R.A.G.E. were in its publicity and execution.
Bad publicity is better than no publicity. Surprisingly, the publicity and branding for this year’s R.A.G.E. was even worse than the previous year. Friends have told me they did not know R.A.G.E. was even happening until they saw their friend of a friend wearing a strange red armband and holding a rice paddle. Even most of my RSO e-boards had completely forgotten until the Friday before opening ceremonies. There were no posters, no unified event branding, scarce social media engagement, and a severe lack of word-of-mouth propagation, probably a result of disappointment in last year’s R.A.G.E. And even when it was mentioned, it was forgettable. There was no excitement. R.A.G.E. did not carry any of the glory or anticipation that was supposed to come with the next generation of Fall festivals. At the very least, Return to Glory was so widespread and mysterious that students (briefly) took interest. So what was the result?
Attendance at many R.A.G.E. events, especially RSO events, was abysmal. At the events I attended, the populace consisted of only the regulars, members of the club, and sometimes even less than that. At The Stute’s own “Where the Duck? Championship Edition,” which the R.A.G.E. committee incorrectly advertised as a “Scavenger Hunt,” there were six people. Everybody got a prize because there were not enough people to really declare a winner. I think not only does this kind of occurrence waste money, but it kills morale for the RSO hosting the event. It makes it seem that in this glorious festival that “hundreds” of students participate in, only five or six thought it worthwhile to come to this event.
Having organized events much larger than R.A.G.E., sometimes it is excusable to slack on publicity if you are putting your focus into operating the event and making it worthwhile for the attendees you already know are coming. This was not the case with R.A.G.E. Clubs were wandering, hoping by some chance the SGA office would be open so they could pick up prizes for their event. Rarely did I see a representative from the R.A.G.E. committee check up on an event to make sure it started on time, was running properly, or was well-attended. (The website for R.A.G.E. was a special disappointment after I learned it was created by my fellow Computer Science and Cybersecurity majors. Not only was it poorly designed, but lacked any sense of security, providing an admin panel where any event organizer could execute arbitrary database queries.)
The lesson to be learned here is that starting from scratch and pulling off a successful, week-long, five-figure budget festival aimed at hundreds of indifferent college students is not a simple task. And it definitely is not something you should throw precious SGA money at until you are sure it will be successful. (Of course, I am sure that the fact that many of the R.A.G.E. committee members are on the SGA, or friends with someone who is, had absolutely nothing to do with the reason it was funded.) Student experiments are a great thing. CPAC was an experiment. Hell, at some point even The Stute itself, some hundred years ago, was probably an experiment: a group of people who gathered together and thought “we should try and make a school newspaper.” But they were experiments that started small, and gained momentum over time, as e-boards gathered knowledge and passed it down through the generations.
I want to see Stevens focus less on huge events and festivals, and more on small student experiments. Rather than giving a selective committee of students large amounts of money to spend arbitrarily on an idea, start small, make plans, get feedback, and iterate often. At the “Innovation University,” if you give guidance and opportunities for groups of excited students to bring their ideas to fruition, every once in a while a good idea will take off. But it is not worth risking a semester’s worth of funding on a possible one-hit wonder.
