This Saturday, the Academic Quad will be full of students decked out in pastels, glitter and knee-high boots as they gear up for Tufts’ biggest event of the year — Spring Fling! With GROUPLOVE opening and Zara Larsson as the headliner, the concert has everyone bursting with excitement. But what goes into planning one of the most anticipated days of the year?
Though Spring Fling was announced on March 5, seniors Quinn Sobieraj and Luke Steiner, Tufts University Social Collective’s live entertainment coordinators, started brainstorming for the event early last summer. Until September, they worked closely with Pretty Polly Productions, which acted as the bridge between TUSC and artist agencies.
One of the first steps in the planning process was establishing the vibe they wanted for the concert. From the beginning, Sobieraj and Steiner were on the same page about their vision for Spring Fling.
“We really prioritized a cohesive concert where there’s an energy buildup, which is something we both wanted,” Steiner said. “We also wanted the general vibe of a fun festival — outdoor, summertime — embodying the Spring Fling energy.”
Early in the process, Steiner and Sobieraj also decided to have only two performers, rather than three, as has been the case in the past. They noted that when the show ran longer, students often got tired. They wanted to prioritize two more impressive names over three smaller ones.
“When we were trying to decide what artists we wanted to send offers to … we created a spectrum of what we thought the Tufts population looked like and tried to find artists that would be right in the middle so we could reach the broadest audience,” Steiner said.
By early October, Sobieraj and Steiner knew that they wanted GROUPLOVE and Larsson as this year’s performers. However, finalizing a lineup was no easy task. Through the production company, they went through several rounds of emailing and negotiation to secure the lineup.
“There’s a lot of waiting between contracting with the [artists and] them sending offers back,” Steiner said. “There’s a lot of negotiation, and so we ultimately have to make a decision on whether something they sent … is something that we’re comfortable with. … It’s a really lengthy process that takes a long time.”
Curating a concert with enough energy to keep Tufts students excited was Sobieraj and Steiner’s priority.
“We started with [finding] a band … because it felt like it had been a few years since we had [one]. And we thought [GROUPLOVE’s] energy was a really great platform to lead into the hype energy that [Larsson] brings,” Sobieraj said. “With our headliner, we were very focused on catching someone at the right time in their career. We saw that she was getting a little … more attention again, and I think we just struck at the perfect time, because she is completely skyrocketing in her career.”
When the announcement went live, the student body was electric. GROUPLOVE’s upbeat and nostalgic vibe, combined with Larsson’s recent resurgence in popularity, had many students eagerly anticipating the day. Sophomore Tiger Nguyen’s video announcement on the TUSC Instagram was a major part of building that excitement.
As a graphic designer on TUSC’s marketing team, Nguyen switched gears to take on this larger-scale videography role for Spring Fling toward the end of last semester. Working on the video announcement for over three months, he was closely involved in bringing this year’s Spring Fling to life.
“A lot of it was trial and error; I messed with a bunch of different overlays, a bunch of different effects and saw what stuck,” Nguyen said. “Every transition, every part that I made, I rendered it and then sent a draft to the rest of the Spring Fling marketing team and was like, ‘Hey, what do you guys think of this? What should I change? What should I add?’ The whole process was more collaborative than I would have assumed.”
Sobieraj and Steiner also collaborated closely with Tom Adams, the Tufts director of health promotion, to incorporate harm-reduction measures and ensure the event runs smoothly.
“We are redoing some of the language for the harm-reduction lawn signs … we [want to] make sure the messaging that we’re communicating in terms of student safety is something that we feel good about and that a staff member feels good about as well,” Sobieraj said.
While all the exciting elements on the day of the concert — the graffiti wall, snack stations, photo ops, lawn games and giveaways — might seem to be there simply for enjoyment, many of these decisions are guided by considerations of student safety.
“To prioritize health and safety by making the environment more exciting, there’s a lot of things we’re trying to do that help with crowd control by pulling people into fun activities,” Steiner said.
At an event of this scale, environmental impact is also a key consideration. To limit plastic water bottle waste, a new system will be used.
“We’re doing canned water at the concert … and more water refill stations, and we’re offering reusable [plastic] tumblers that are colorful and fun so that students can have that as a souvenir,” Sobieraj said.
The biggest takeaway Steiner and Sobieraj have from coordinating this event is how challenging and rewarding it is to take on a project that aims to please a population as large as the Tufts student body.
“I’ve never really done something [like this] before, in TUSC or outside of [it], where I’m trying to think of how to make something exciting and fun and safe … for a group of this size,” Steiner said. “It’s really an exercise in how much we can try to understand the Tufts environment.”
“I want students to know that we’re doing everything that we can think of to make this as exciting and positively memorable as possible for them. We want to make everyone feel seen and [for] everyone’s needs to be met, and that we’re predicting those needs the best that we can,” Sobieraj said. “We think this year is going to be very exciting!”
