The lack of snow during the beginning of this winter season has challenged organizations across campus participating in the Month-Long Winter Carnival Statue. According to the official rules, the building began on Jan. 1 at 12:01 a.m. and will come to an end with the conclusion of Winter Carnival’s All-Nighter. The Month-Long Statue build requires a lot of design, scheduling, manual labor, and of course, snow. However, as the competing students returned from winter break, the resulting accumulation of snow within their building sites left much to be desired.
Statue Chair Casey Lentowich of Tau Kappa Epsilon says, “The biggest impact with the lack of snow will be the decreased build time along with having to travel farther for clean snow.” Due to the design of some of these large statues, additional snow is often outsourced and brought to the building site to contribute to the structure. Tau Kappa Epsilon took second place in the 2023 Month-Long competition and are expecting that they will be able to proudly show off another statue this year. “We believe we can still build a great statue with the snow that we will be getting in the upcoming week but it will require a lot more work,” Lentowich said.
Luckily for these organizations, more snow is forecasted for the remainder of the building period and students are excited to see what can be accomplished even with less time to work. Statue Master Aly Soule of Delta Zeta says, “Delta Zeta and Sig Eps have added shifts for statue to get more time out there on site. I think the lack of time is going to light more of a fire in each person to get the same quality of statue in a week less.” Delta Zeta took second place in the Co-ed Division for 2023 and is, much like the rest of the student body, excited for more snow and Winter Carnival alike.
