Amisha Iyer ’19, Giorgie Mccombe ’19, Angela Zhao ’19, Mia Katz ’21, and Mr. Gary Lynch dress in style for the annual Choate Trashion Show.
Choate’s Earth Week began this past Friday, April 13, organized by the Choate C-proctors. Every day of the week, there is a small and interactive event for the Choate community to take part in. The week began with a screening of The Lorax and pizza-making at the KEC on Friday. On Monday, April 16, there was a local food tasting in the dining hall, during which local food companies came and demonstrated to the students what kinds of food options are available locally; on Tuesday during conference period, the C-Proctors, namely Hannah Paridis ’18, organized the Trashion Show in the dining hall. On Tuesday evening, students had the opportunity to stargaze from the science center. Today, there will be a screening of Chasing Coral in the SAC, with free snacks. Tomorrow, students will come together at Mem Field to roast some s’mores using solar ovens; and on Sunday there is a trash pick-up and an invasive species removal around campus. Throughout the whole week, there has also been an Instagram photo competition for the best nature photography.
A specific group of C-Proctors has been in charge of this and has been planning this week in detail since winter term. “We’ve been thinking about and talking about Earth Week since winter term, so it’s definitely all the C-Proctors’ work. We also reached out to some clubs to co-sponsor some events,” commented Sophie Mackin ’18, one of the students in charge of organizing Earth Week.
Regarding her role in the organization and running of the Earth Week events, Paridis commented, “The personal event I organize every year is the Trashion Show. I run that every year — I run the music and organize the contestants, the food, and the judges. I also email with other clubs to co-sponsor events, like other environmental clubs on campus as well as Young Democrats or Young Republicans — sometimes they help with those events.”
While the C-proctors have not decided on a single theme for this year’s Earth Week, many of them agreed that one of the primary goals of the week was to better engage the Choate community with the week’s events. Mackin remarked, “We definitely tried to have activities that were interactive, like stargazing or the trash pickup — people are there doing things and learning about things. We tried to engage Choate students in a more fun way.”
PJ Sethbhakdi ’20, another student who took part in organizing the week’s events, had a similar stance: “Our main focus is to explain the importance of sustainability.” He continued, “We hope that these events could be a way to connect students. This is a time of the year when students would have the opportunity to learn or do something.”
The C-Proctors organized Earth Week for the sake of the students’ engagement and participation, but the most important purpose of the week is to promote the student body’s awareness of the environment. “We hope that Choate kids are thinking about the environment and thinking about their impact all the time, but this week is a good time to pay extra attention to the habits that they have,” Mackin commented.
Sethbhakdi added, “We want them to understand that every bit of effort could make a difference in the world. We want them to look at the problems that occur in the world not in the perspective of a regular Choate student, but a person that could help and influence other to help the main causes to our problems.”
Paridis said, “I want the Choate community just to learn that it should be part of your daily life and that it’s not just something you do for a week to have fun, but it’s something that’s important to keep going. That’s also why we do Green Cup and Hydro Cup for so long — that’s meant to ingrain those habits in you. I really hope people take away from Earth Week that it’s really important to do these things.”
