News

Inaugural SG egg hunt dubbed great success

1,000 hidden during 5-day campus-wide prize quest

By Rachel Curit

Posted on April 24, 2011, at 11:32 p.m.

Haley Johnston

University of Maine Student Government held its first Egg Hunt on campus during the week prior to Easter Sunday. Students canvassed campus searching for as many of the 1,000 eggs hidden as possible to redeem them for special prizes.

University of Maine Student Government held its first Egg Hunt last week, beginning in the dark hours of Monday morning and ending Friday afternoon.
“It was quite wild on Sunday night,” said Jose Roman, a second-year mass communication student and director of External Affairs for Student Government. “People were already buzzing about it.”

More than 100 students hunted for eggs and though Roman had no idea what the final numbers were, he was enthusiastic about the results. According to Roman, some students got so into the egg hunt that others could not find any eggs.
“Hiding 1,000 eggs was the biggest burden,” Roman said. After “cleaning out Dollar Tree” of plastic eggs, members of Student Government stashed them all over campus Sunday night. Significantly fewer eggs were nestled among tree branches or under hedges halfway through the week, so volunteers went out on Wednesday night to hide more.

The color of each egg was coordinated with its location and each egg had a point value. Eggs were found between signs, in trees and on windowsills, among other places.
“I really wanted to hide eggs in places that people should know exist,” Roman said. The idea was “that these places would get more traffic.”

Some eggs were hidden more creatively. For example, volunteers hid an egg in the Student Legal Services office. Clues, such as a photograph vaguely showing an egg’s hiding spot, were posted on Twitter. Roman said he saw students walking around with their laptops open, looking for the picture’s location.
They even gave an egg to Debbie, “the world famous Union cashier,” according to Roman. To get the egg, a student needed to sing the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song to her.
Finding an egg in a special hiding place won a student a prize instantly, such as Skullcandy headphones.
Before they could hide the eggs, there was prep work that Roman and other Student Government members needed to do, but it “wasn’t that bad,” he said. There was a lot of “grunt computer work” creating the maps for the egg hunt, he said.
“[The] tediousness came in with the slips,” Roman said, adding that a lot of cutting and folding was involved. He described an assembly line of all the Student Government members cutting and folding paper and stuffing the eggs.
“Basically, we [wanted to reach out] to the students,” he said. “We fund other groups, but we don’t have [events] that we do every year. I wanted students to pay more attention to what we do. I wanted us to be reachable. We are here, we can have fun and we’re here to listen.”
Roman said he wants to make the hunt an annual event, but next year Student Government does not plan on announcing when it will be. He plans to hide the eggs and then say, “The egg hunt is here,” without prior advertising.
Student Government announced the winners on Friday. According to Jose Roman, Matt Pender was in first place with 1,195 points, followed by Chris Goodwin with 704. Tyler Roy was next with 446 points; Rob Stigile, the news editor for The Maine Campus, with 276; Curwin Martin with 258 and Sergio Alfonzo with 190.

The winners chose prizes in the order in which they won. These included an iPod Touch, an HP All-in-One Printer, a gas card worth $50, a $25 gift certificate to Starbucks, and a prepaid Visa debit card.
“We were concerned that college students wouldn’t be interested, but as it turns out,

it was the exact opposite,” Roman said.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2011, 11:32 pm. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.