The "New" UChicago

dunbar
Fri, 18 May 2012 00:08:47 +0000

I was thinking about this last night. On the one hand, Scav Hunt just ended, and by all reports it was fantastic, hundreds and hundreds of students participating, great, creative work, etc. So how different could the recently admitted students be? On the other hand, I noticed that the two largest, most conventional dorms – Max P and South Campus – seem to underperform their human resource advantage by a considerable margin. South Campus, with 800 students in residence, couldn’t even do better than all of the grad student teams, much less keep pace with dorms less than half its size. Although I suspect part of what’s happening is that the high-quality BJ team pulls in the most enthusiastic South Campus scavvies, one can hypothesize that maybe a larger number than ususal of the first and second years, the ones most drawn to the “social” dorms, are opting not to participate in Scav. (4-6 years ago, Max P was a powerhouse, and was the last team to have beaten Snitchcock until last year.)

Anyway, any current students care to comment? Scav seems like a pretty good miner’s canary for the old, weird Chicago

I’m a first-year in South, so I might be able to chime in here. First-years made up a very small portion of the South Scav team. However, I don’t think this indicates a shift in kind from the old UChicago ideals. For one thing, having eight houses of ~100 people each makes it much harder to generate common excitement towards something like Scav. You really have to go out of your way to participate in Scav, and if none of your friends seem to be interested, this just isn’t going to happen. A lot of people saw Scav as being something that could potentially be fun, but didn’t feel a strong enough desire to participate with so many other things going on. You would need the buzz that’s more characteristic of a tightly-knit group to convince people of its relative importance. It’s much easier to get a group of 200 together than it is to get a group of 800 together to make 1/4 of the commitment. This also contributes to the major difference in amount of off-campus/alumni help received by each dorm, giving Snitchcock and BJ an even greater advantage. South has been particularly disadvantaged in this regard with the move from the Shoreland. And people here who are serious about Scav go elsewhere. The overall effect is that South begin to see intense involvement in Scav like trying too hard in gym class, whether that is an accurate portrayal or not.

(fwiw: I never felt particularly compelled to participate myself, though I was away for Saturday and Sunday anyhow)