Games, activities and professional entertainment are coming to Hopkins, but it's not the fair you're thinking of. Just a few weeks after orientation is over and classes have commenced, Homewood will host the first annual Fall Festival. Organizers for the event hope the event will promote school spirit, build a sense of community, and become its own memorable tradition.
An October 1st date is set for the festival, a three-day celebration packed with activities. The Fall Festival, made possible with money from an anonymous donor, seeks to do much more than give Johns Hopkins a homecoming. The Festival is being implemented in part to instill a sense of community among the university and to extend the freshman Orientation fun past early September and throughout the entire student body.
"Fall Festival will provide a community-wide event early in the year--one that hopefully students will be able to look forward to," said Dean of Student Life Susan Boswell. "At events such as the cookout, faculty and students will be able to sit down in a relaxing environment and get to know each other better."
The festival will begin with an afternoon cookout and finish with a breakfast in the Glass Pavilion of Levering Hall. The featured stretch of the festival will be between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, which is being referred to as the Fallnighter. To create a fun-filled, carnival- like atmosphere, there will be a campus wide scavenger hunt, potato sack races, an outdoor movie, open mic night, a headliner comedy act, and television game show parodies as well as a varsity football game and men's and women's soccer competitions.
The Fall Festival will share some traits with the Spring Fair but will be smaller in scale and limited to just those associated with Johns Hopkins University.
"We want to build a sense of pride in Johns Hopkins at the beginning of the academic year," Associate Dean of Student Life Ralph Johnson told The Gazette. "The main focus is enhancing the sense of community here."
The Festival comes at an ideal time because the Commission of Undergraduate Education's final report detailed the need for more community-oriented events. In addition to being fun, many of the activities planned will be centered upon bringing students, faculty and staff together for team-oriented competitions and events in which the teams must have student, faculty, and staff representation. "We want people to come away saying they had a lot of fun, but also that they got to know people in our community and maybe broke down a barrier or two," Johnson said in The Gazette. "And we certainly want students to feel really good about their choice to come to Johns Hopkins."
Many students are looking forward to the festival already. "I like Spring Fair," said sophomore Will Ares. "So Fall Festival wouldn't be a horrible idea at all."
"I think it would be a good idea because everyone complains that there isn't enough social activity at Hopkins," said sophomore Shana Dorfman.
"Absolutely," added sophomore Ilya Bourtman. "Hopkins does not have a Student Union and because juniors and seniors live off campus, Hopkins students have the unfortunate tendency of forming cliques early on in their college lives and sticking to them. Fall Festival will offer the Hopkins community something it desperately needs--an opportunity to come together collectively and unify."
The organizing committee hopes to decide on a tentative schedule of events by the end of the spring term and finalize them by August 1st. The bookends of the Festival, the cookout and the breakfast, already have set dates. To join the Fall Festival planning committee, contact Johnson at rjohnson@jhu.edu or call 410-516-2224.
