R.A.G.E. is done. Arguably, R.A.G.E. has been finished since the one-two punch “database malfunction” last Thursday. For those reading who don’t know what R.A.G.E. really is, I don’t blame you. If you haven’t been through it already last year, then this whirlwind of duck merchandise, class points, game of Assassins, and mixed events probably makes no sense to you. Heck, I don’t blame you. As one student told me, “I didn’t even know ‘Assassins’ was going on.”
Despite the efforts of the R.A.G.E. planning committee, the Red And Grey Experience was ho-hum this year, and perhaps as forgettable as a barbecue at the start of a semester (when those were allowed). Look, this is not another anti-R.A.G.E. piece in The Stute. Our organization’s agenda is not to berate our fellow classmates and knock the fruits of their collective labor. However, when you are an organization who applied to host a R.A.G.E. event, you expect people to show up.
The Stute hosted an event called “Where the Duck? Championship Edition” on Wednesday, September 30. Our event was based on the titular section of our newspaper. Teams of students were tasked to seek out as many locations as they could, using only a partial picture of that location as reference. There were 55 locations, one team, and a grand total of eight attendees. In short, while we had fun with the event as an organization ourselves, the event was a failure. If you think about it, how could it have been a success? No Facebook post, no tweet — the only form of advertising I saw from the R.A.G.E. committee for it was a big, pixelated poster with “Scavenger Hunt – September 30” written on it. Not even freshman Frankie would want to go to an unlabeled scavenger hunt.
Who is to blame? I don’t know. Speaking with the R.A.G.E. publicity manager, I know a lot of work went into R.A.G.E. Of course, a lot more advertising could have been done, or, if you’re going to market R.A.G.E. virally a la last year, a bigger splash could have been made to drum up hype for one of Stevens’ bigger student-run events of the year.
For whatever reason, this year’s planning has oozed of hastiness. For example, although Stevens’ Next Best Dance Crew was a well-attended event, the president of TECHnique told me that they could barely get together teams involving their new members, because it was too early in the year. I don’t want to don a conspiratorial tinfoil hat, nor do I want to further the cynicism of the disgruntled upperclassmen. However, I don’t know if the administration is pushing RSOs to have more events in a shorter timespan, or if students are haphazardly and halfheartedly assembling events (which I hope is not the case), but my observation in my earliest editorial seems to be accurate. This semester, from SNBDC to R.A.G.E., the common thread is “rush,” and it’s not the exhilarating kind.
