Bad Ideas Weekend 2025 holds 28 events from Jan. 24 to Jan. 26
Wergeland: “The Green Building Challenge really showcases MIT’s ability to just choose a ridiculous goal and go for it.”
From Friday, Jan. 24 to Sunday, Jan. 26, Bad Ideas Weekend took place at various locations on campus. Bad Ideas Weekend is an annual tradition that happens towards the end of MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP), providing students the opportunity to create and partake in events based on absurd, wacky, or creative ideas. This year, there were a total of 28 different events, ranging from Good Morning Rave to Dig Your Own Grave.
The funding for this year’s Bad Ideas Weekend came from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences’ De Florez Fund for Humor, the Association of Student Activities’s Large Event Fund (LEF), DormCon, and East Campus.
Logistics and organization
Traditionally, Bad Ideas Weekend is primarily organized and run by East Campus. Even though the physical dorm is closed for renovations this year, East Campus community members, including many prospective residents, took the lead in managing the logistics of the weekend and organizing many events. Locations for events included the East Campus Student Center Space, Eastman Court, and dorm buildings such as Random Hall, Next House, and McCormick Hall. This year, the three Bad Ideas Chairs who oversaw and managed the events were Evan Barkho '27, Lia Bronhard-Yates '28, and Riya Tyagi '28.
In an interview with The Tech, Bronhard-Yates stated that the chairs’ most difficult responsibility was “getting everything organized and getting approvals from EHS,” a task which involved sending numerous emails and handling miscommunication issues. For instance, Bronhard-Yates originally proposed an event, “Human Meatball Obstacle Course,” which did not get approved by EHS because they said that “slip-n-slides were too dangerous” for college students.
Although the Human Meatball Obstacle Course event did not happen, Bronhard-Yates successfully organized another event in which participants helped build and launch a giant trebuchet with a five-foot long and five-foot tall base and an arm measuring six-and-a-half feet long. This event happened in a previous Bad Idea Weekend, and Bronhard-Yates decided to run it again because she wanted to learn more about building a trebuchet from start to finish. “Weirdly enough, there are a lot of resources on the internet about how to build one,” Bronhard-Yates said.
Highlighted individual events
This year, the assortment of events at Bad Ideas Weekend included traditional events that run almost every year, such as 2^n Cookies and 2^n Dumplings, as well as new events such as Dig Your Own Grave and Fruit Ninja.
In Dig Your Own Grave, students worked together to dig a two-foot wide, six-foot long, and four-foot deep hole in the enclosed courtyard between Buildings 3 and 5. When asked about his inspiration for the event, Pablo Hu '27 said that “it was just a bad idea,” and said he was surprised that the event was approved. In order to bury something in the grave, a small group of students went to the Stata loading docks and found a slightly deflated soccer ball. The grave was ultimately finished at 6:00 p.m., an hour after the scheduled event end time, but completed nonetheless.
In Fruit Ninja, students used a baseball bat to hit and destroy a wide variety of fruits, including mangoes, apples, oranges, and even a papaya. Participants had the option to either swing at fruits after they were thrown toward the participant or to hit the fruit off of a stand. Andy Chen '28 organized this event in Eastman Court. Chen himself took several swings at fruit during the event, swinging as if he was hitting a baseball and successfully splitting some apples in half. In his spare time, Chen enjoys creating metal objects; his past creations include a spear and several swords such as a katana.
In 2^n Dumplings, people gathered in the Next House country kitchen to make as many dumplings as possible. The event officially began at 11:00 a.m., but the dumpling making got off to a sluggish start. Organizer Spencer Pogorzelski '28 said that it took him a while to figure out the logistics, including familiarizing himself with the kitchen, figuring out the recipe for the dumplings, and delegating tasks to make the dumplings efficiently in an assembly-line process. The pace of production increased rapidly in the evening: by 5:30 p.m., about 160 dumplings (over n=7) had been made, but by the time the event finished, around 8:00 p.m., the dumpling count was 593 (over n=9).
While most events ran according to plan, a few, such as Food Fight, did not turn out as expected. Food Fight organizer Bianca Hanly ’24 said that she initially envisioned this event as a reenactment of a food fight scene from a movie. The event did not go as planned; none of the participants actually wanted to throw food at each other, and they instead threw food at a watermelon to break it, which did not work in the end.
During the 'food fight', the wind began moving the food, trays, and tarp around the courtyard, creating a scramble to retrieve the trays and clean up the mess. After the extensive cleanup, Hanly stated, “This is definitely a bad idea that will not be rerun.” However, she later added that “the best bad ideas are ones that run for one year only because no one wants to run them again.”
Green Building Challenge
The Green Building Challenge was one of the largest-scale events organized for Bad Ideas Weekend, lasting from 8:00 p.m. to midnight on Sunday, Jan. 26. A total of 94 participants from 19 different teams raced to complete as many runs as possible up the Green Building’s stairs, from basement to the top floor. Upon reaching the top, they took the elevator back down to the basement and repeated the climb until time ran out.
According to the official results, the East Campus floor Putz won first place with a total of 200 runs by 9 team members, averaging just over 20 runs per member; the independent living group Pika came in second with 158 runs, and MIT’s AI Alignment club (MAIA) placed third with 141 runs. Individually, Gael Medina from team Putz placed first with 46 runs, Yishen Chen from team Stair Master placed second with 43 runs, and Ionel-Emilian Chiosa from team MAIA placed third with 39 runs. Excluding officially counted breaks and time in elevators, the average time for a run up the building was estimated at 7 minutes and 17 seconds.
In an interview with The Tech, Rowan Wergeland '28 said that he decided to do the Green Building Challenge because it “felt like a tradition,” and he wanted to support Florey, his East Campus floor, in the competition against the other floors. When asked what his favorite aspect was, Wergeland initially joked, “It certainly wasn’t the stairs.” Despite the physically taxing nature of the challenge, Wergeland appreciated how the Green Building Challenge “really showcases MIT’s ability to just choose a ridiculous goal and go for it.”
“Climbing up the tallest building on campus over and over again doesn’t sound like fun nor is it easy,” Wergeland said. “It didn’t really have a reason to exist, but we did it anyway.”