In preparation for Spring Fling next month, the Social Planning and Events Committee’s Spring Fling committee has sponsored a new series of events, called Fling Fridays, for the past three weeks.
The idea behind Fling Fridays was to tie in this year’s theme, “40 Years of Fling,” into programming leading up to the weekend itself. “Originally…we thought of doing 40 Fling-related events leading up to Fling, but that fell through,” explained College freshman Ling Zhou, a Spring Fling committee member. The Friday events, she added, are “mainly publicity events to get people excited and buzzing about Fling.”
The next planned event is a quizzo at City Tap House, which has yet to be scheduled. This is a chance for would-be Flingers to get out and win floor passes and other Fling prizes.
The first Fling Friday was for the launch of a new website for Spring Fling, held in Houston Hall on Feb. 15. There, the committee debuted the website on Microsoft Surface tablets, offering free Jimmy John’s to whoever came through.
“The website is new, and it’s a way to centralize all the information people normally ask about during Fling — where to buy tickets, artist information, etc. I don’t know why we haven’t done it before, but it’s definitely a good idea,” Director of the Spring Fling committee and Nursing and Wharton senior Kelly Chen said.
“The website launch was pretty cool,” Zhou said. “I think we had a pretty good turnout. People were coming and going through Houston like normal, so they could just stop in and see what we were up to.”
Kendra Carson, a College freshman and Under the Button writer, enjoyed the event. “It was a lot of fun,” she said.
“We got to explore the new Fling website, which had a lot of information on it. You can already see the whole Fling thing starting to come together.”
The other event so far was a gallery walk in the Fox Art Gallery in Claudia Cohen Hall, which opened on Feb. 22. The committee compiled old photos of Fling throughout the years, from the 1970s to today, and displayed them for about a week, Chen said.
“We went through the archive and took photos from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. The people who came were really excited. It’s nice to see how Fling evolved. We had a picture from a few decades ago showing a hot-air balloon flying over the Quad, which definitely would not be allowed now,” Chen added.
The final event will be an Instagram scavenger hunt. The committee will disperse clues around campus related to Fling history, and hunters will be able to go around and Instagram pictures of the clues to earn prizes.
“If anything, Fling Fridays is supposed to stress how great Fling’s history is,” Chen said. “And most of all, it shows how amazing this year’s Fling will be.”
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