The Streak
For my entire time in college, I planned an event every single month. As president of ARGO, Allegheny's board game club, event planning was technically part of the job. But somewhere along the way it stopped being a duty and became one of my favorite creative mediums.
The Greatest Hits
- The ARGO Formal, three years running: I sourced the food, organized the space, and ran the night. And yes, we hired the Party Pigs. You have not lived until your formal has pigs at it.
- Humans vs. Zombies: a campus-wide scavenger hunt with tag elements. Equal parts logistics puzzle and live-action game design.
- ARGO Touches Grass: an outdoor campfire party with board games, which is exactly the right name for convincing a board game club to go outside.
- A murder mystery night where the students were the suspects.
- And the monthly regulars: game nights, tournaments, and whatever experiment that month's idea turned into.
Events Are Designed Experiences
Planning an event is the same discipline as designing software, just with chairs. You have an audience with different needs, a flow people move through, failure modes to plan for (rain, no-shows, running out of food), and a budget that says no to your favorite idea. Every event taught me to think about the experience from the attendee's side first, which is exactly how I think about users now.
A formal needs food, a space, music, and a reason to stay past the first hour. A campus-wide game of tag needs rules that are fair, safe, and impossible to misread at a full sprint. A campfire party needs a backup plan for weather. None of that is so different from shipping a website: the plan is only as good as its edge cases.
Plan the Thing
If you are a student reading this: volunteer to plan the event. It is project management, budgeting, marketing, logistics, and hospitality rolled into one, and nobody can take the experience away from you. Also, if you can possibly hire pigs, hire the pigs.