Scavenger hunt

JHS
Mon, 22 May 2017 16:23:55 +0000

1. I find that blog fascinating, because it's as much about Harvard as it is about the University of Chicago or Scav Hunt. It really underlines the extent to which people at Harvard feel pressure to live up to their association with the university, and also feel that Harvard automatically plugs them in to the world of movers and shakers. Frivolity may be OK, but it should be frivolity with a purpose, like comping the Lampoon so you can get hired as a writer on some edgy comedy in Hollywood or New York. (Actually, directionless nerdery does exist at Harvard, but it doesn't blow its own horn much.)

Students at Chicago don’t necessarily feel that they are automatically part of the Ruling Class just by being there, and they don’t lie awake at night wondering whether they will prove themselves worthy of their admission.

1. Anyway, the best way to learn about Scav is to read the website and the last few years' lists. There was also a half-decent article in The New Yorker 3-4 years ago. It's not really a scavenger hunt. Almost all of the (many) items involve some sort of creativity -- sometimes in figuring out what the question is, sometimes in figuring out how you can convert the challenge into a metaphor to make it solvable, sometimes in convincing people with no stake in Scav to help you out, sometimes in getting a lot of people to coordinate, often in doing some art or engineering (or art/engineering) project. Cooking may also be involved.

Random items from past years I remember: The famous build-a-nuclear-reactor. Bring a DeLorean to Judgment. (Reputedly, the judges almost dropped that prompt as unrealistic. Four teams succeeded in finding DeLorean owners and getting them to bring their cars to campus for the Sunday judgment.) Blot out the sun and cast all of Hyde Park into darkness. (Apparently, that was deemed realistic.) Build a player piano that also serves cocktails mechanically. Produce a chapter of the Nikkiminajian Ethics. Make a potato break the sound barrier. (One team used family connections to get a potato onto a supersonic fighter jet training flight, another used an airgun to shoot its potato at a panel of acoustic tile, breaking the tile.)

It’s completely student run, by the judges. The judges are generally third or fourth year students who are selected by the previous board (although the judges usually include at least one recent graduate who has the ability to drive around the country for weeks scouting funny challenges for the sub-part of Scav that consists of a very busy ~1,000-mile road trip by 4-5 members of each team that cares to field a road-trip contingent). There is also usually a silly-Olympics session on Friday afternoon during Scav, and a party Friday night that used to be famously out-of-control but hasn’t been for years.

It’s a very intense process. The list is revealed in some elaborate manner at midnight Wednesday night, and final judging occurs pretty much all day the following Sunday (always Mother’s Day) – so the whole thing happens over about 3-3/4 days. Most participants may work on 1-5 items over that period, but some hard-core scavvies (which necessarily include the road-trippers are engaged on a 24/3.75 basis. Lots of things are scored along the way, or are submitted to the judges as videos. (During Scav Hunt, most of the large teams have websites with videos of many of their accomplishments up.) Serious teams will prepare for weeks ahead of time, gathering materials that may be useful. Teams that don’t have a dorm lounge at their disposal have to figure out where to meet, to pull all-nighters, and to store stuff.

Anyone who wants can form a team, and in recent years there has been something of a fashion for one- or two-person teams. Traditionally, each of the dorms forms a team, or allies with other dorms to form a team (more common in the past when there were more small dorms). Sometimes internal politics leads one or another house to split from its dorm and ally with some other team. Individuals can scav with whatever team they want, regardless of where they live, or even whether they are students at the University of Chicago. In any event, really trying to be competitive overall probably requires fairly active involvement from 100+ team members, and usually there are not more than 4-5 teams, if that, who can muster that many. Everyone else – and lots of the people on those big teams, not to mention the judges – is just doing it for fun. So there’s a whole element of competition, but only a small number of participants are actually being competitive. Most are just trying to do something cool and funny, and to see the cool, funny things other people come up with. Some of the leaders of the large teams are super-competitive, however.

For as long as I have been following Scav, Snell-Hitchcock has had a dominant team, although not so dominant that some other team doesn’t win sometimes. I have only seen Snitchcock place lower than second once. Since Snitchcock is a pretty small dorm, its dominance depends on a really strong tradition, near-universal involvement by residents, and a high nerd factor among team members. (Also, Snitchcock produces more than its share of the judges, who are often accused by other teams of favoring Snitchcock.) BJ seems to have a decently strong multi-year tradition going.