UCSD united for a day of revelry on May 15, when thousands of students, alumni and assorted concertgoers poured onto campus for the 27th annual Sun God Festival.
At 7 a.m. on the morning of the event, students began lining up at the Ridge Walk tennis courts to claim their festival wristbands, eventually forming a line that wound past Peterson Hall and Geisel Library. At one point, it stretched as far as Earl Warren College Mall.
A new wristband retrieval system was implemented this year in an effort to speed up the distribution process. However, some festivalgoers waited in line for up to four hours while volunteers distributed wristbands at 24 booths.
‘There were so many people,’ John Muir College sophomore Heather Geisler said. ‘It was really crowded and unorganized ‘hellip; Everyone was cutting in line.’
According to festival coordinators Alex Bramwell and Jeanette Ordonez, the initial rush was due to a fear among students that wristbands would run out quickly. This concern was aggravated by the official Sun God Web site, which advised students to arrive early due event limited capacity of RIMAC Field.
According to Associate Vice President of Concerts and Events Garrett Berg, there were just under 1,000 wristbands left unclaimed by the end of the night.
‘Everyone panicked and got there early,’ Bramwell said. ‘People were just nervous about us running out of wristbands when they really didn’t need to be. So people that showed up at 9 a.m. ended up waiting two or three hours, whereas if they’d showed up at 1 p.m. they would have gotten the same wristband and gotten to go right up to the front of the line.’
The line subsided by noon, at which point students were able to retrieve their wristbands in a matter of minutes. Bramwell said that the same distribution system could be used again next year, provided that festival organizers better inform students of the abundance of wristbands.
‘When you have 18,000 people showing up all at once there’s only so much you can do,’ he said. ‘If it was properly messaged to students that they really didn’t have anything to worry about, then I think that this system would work fine, so that people would show up throughout the day when they had free time instead of all showing up at 9 a.m.’
Daytime attractions on RIMAC Field included a collection of student films screened by campus venue the Loft, circus and dance performances under the centrally located midway tent and a set by folk-rocker Iron ‘amp; Wine.
After dark, audiences flocked to performances by mashup artist Girl Talk ‘mdash; whose hour-long set packed the dance tent to near capacity ‘mdash; and rock-rap trio N.E.R.D.
‘Even if we had made no changes to the festival format, our lineup this year was just so much more of what students were looking for,’ Berg said. ‘The full atmosphere of the event this year was worlds better.’
The day’s events weren’t limited to RIMAC Field. At the Student Center, KSDT hosted an alternative music festival called Shun God, and student satire newspaper the Koala set up its annual Slip ‘N Slide on Sun God Lawn.
Readers can contact Reza Farazmand at [email protected].