The annual school festival, Sunrise Festival will be held on May. 10 to 12. The motto of 2017 Sunrise Festival is ‘YOLO,’ which is the abbreviation of ‘You Only Live Once.’ According to the head of this year’s festival preparation committee, Kwon Won-pyo (EE 14), the festival preparation committee chose this motto because they wanted to say, “Let’s enjoy the 2017 Sunrise Festival, for it won’t come again.” The festival preparation committee desires to make a festival that everybody can enjoy together. Their goal is making the Sunrise Festival enjoyable to all Postechians, including all undergraduates, graduates, professors, and the faculty members.
Sunrise Festival is consisted of various groups which spend weeks to prepare. Each department sets up their pubs, selling food and liquor. In some departments, the freshmen prepare dance performances. Various student clubs prepare performances, while others set up their own booths and sell items. The festival preparation committee designs and prepares events that everyone can enjoy. They are planning to use the underground chamber of the engineering buildings like last year. Also, they plan to decorate the campus similar as the 2015 Sunrise Festival. The e-sports competition will be held again, as always.
However, the aspect of this year’s Sunrise Festival will be different, due to the upcoming changes of the school’s admission policy. Now, a lot of freshmen participate in the Sunrise Festival through their department’s dance. They have places to hang out, since each department opens their department pubs. However, starting from 2018, all freshmen will not be associated in any departments. This means that it would be harder for next year’s freshmen to participate and enjoy the Sunrise Festival if no alteration is made.
Reflecting the modification of the school’s admission policy, festival preparation committee is planning experimental events. Unlike the festivals before, this year’s Sunrise Festival will spread its focus from departments to freshmen classes. Considering that it is an arduous task for the freshmen, who just entered college, to plan and produce events for the festival, the festival preparation committee plans to make events that offers an opportunity for the freshmen to participate as classes, like the Residential College (RC) Olympics. RC Olympics is an event held at the residential college where students volunteer to participate in teams, which is usually constituted of freshmen classes. By planning and creating new events, the festival preparation committee hopes to increase freshmen participation and also help the next year’s festival preparation committee to find their solution to the impending problem.
Although the POSTECH Science & Engineering Festival will also be held on the last day of the Sunrise Festival, and many people think that the two events are connected, Mr. Kwon stressed out that the two festivals are independent events with different preparing organizations. “The two organizations exist independently, and does their own work,” he commented, while also saying “we do help each other out when we can.”