Fall Fest ended Sunday, leaving some students relaxed amidst an impending cascade of midterm exams. It also served as a taster of what is to come in the spring with the activity-saturated Spring Fair. Over the past few years, Spring Fair has consistently attracted larger crowds and offered a greater diversity of sights and events to Hopkins students than most other campus programs, including Fall Fest.
This page believes that Fall Fest events should expand in variety and improve in quality to match the level of diversity and student-engagement observed during its more popular springtime counterpart.
The zombie-themed Fall Fest hosted a line of events, including Midnight Breakfast, Humans vs. Zombies, laser tag, and a screening of Zombieland. However, the variety of activities for students to participate and engage in seemed modest compared to that of Spring Fair. The Freshman Quad was not crowded by food-trucks and their hungry patrons. The Beach did not host student bands, and Keyser Quad lacked the lively atmosphere created by off-campus vendors.
The incorporation of more attractive sights, enjoyable events or simply the welcoming of off-campus vendors to Fall Fest, could prove to be a socially profitable venture not only for Hopkins students but for the larger Charles Village community. Expanding events and offerings to match Spring Fair offers an opportunity to envelop and foster University-community relaitons.
But if the University attempts to provide an amusing, campus-wide program comparable to Spring Fair every fall, it needs to better develop the logistics of Fall Fest. This means more pre-planning and better advertising. Such augmentations have the potential to create a lively and exciting atmosphere on campus before they go into hibernation over the winter interval.
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