To ward away the winter blues, departments on campus such as the Head of School Office, the Office of Alumni Engagement, and Cluster Council have come together to organize a series of “Snooze the Blues” events and cluster-based activities to boost moods and school spirit.
Introduced last year at the suggestion of Paul Murphy ’84, Instructor in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, Snooze the Blues consists of various pop-up events throughout the term. The year’s first event, hosted on December 16, features a hot cocoa bar and sugar cookies. Aya Murata, Assistant Dean of Students & Residential Life, outlined other upcoming events.
“The Office of Alumni Engagement and the Office of Academy Resources [are] going to do [an event where] if you go dancing into the Alumni Engagement Office, you’ll get a prize. I know that the [Rebecca M.] Sykes Wellness Center is combining with Snooze the Blues to offer UV light boxes. You sit in front of them to get the UV light that you’re not getting from sunshine naturally in the winter,” said Murata.
Additionally, both Winter and Spring Term will have individual Cluster Olympics events, with scores determined by a series of standalone competitions taking place throughout each term. These contests include a gingerbread house-building competition on December 13 and the Winter Cluster Olympics Dodgeball, scheduled for February 22.
Murata expanded upon the thought process behind planning various events. The primary goal of the events is to create opportunities for the community to come together, especially in the bleakness of winter.
“This is still slowly coming together. Over the course of the winter, we’re trying to bring the community together, instill fun, and get people out of their dorms when it’s cold and dark. We’ll have a series of standalone Cluster Olympic events that will add up to determine a winner at the end of Winter Term. This winner will count toward something at the beginning of Spring Term. Spring Term is fast and furious, so it feels hard to schedule a separate big event. I wanted every term to have a cluster winner,” said Murata.
Eliza Francis ’26 highlighted her enjoyment of going to the fall Cluster Olympics. However, she questioned whether the new format of optional, standalone competitions would lead to less student participation.
“I like the idea that they’re trying to incorporate more activities or community bonding, but I’m not sure the new format will be as effective as the beginning of the fall term. I think that having all the events put together on one night, and being mandatory and a full school event forced a unity that ended up being really genuine and organic, whereas I feel like there won’t be as much excitement circulating around little activities or games throughout the term,” said Francis.
Cluster-based programming during the Winter Term underwent scheduling changes due to weather restrictions. Inti Stephenson ’25 and Talia Ivory ’25, Co-Presidents of the Pine Knoll Cluster, elaborated on some of the factors that went into play while planning.
“This term’s competitions are definitely more focused on individual competitions because there are not many competitions you can do outside or with big groups. This one’s going to be more focused on which cluster can perform individual competitions well. Dodgeball is the biggest, in terms of size, it’s going to get. This is going to be a bunch of smaller competitions to break up the monotony,” said Ivory.
Possible competitions in the future include a cluster-wide spirit day and a snow sculpture-making contest. Murata hopes that these events can serve as a reminder that students can get a better sense of the community that they can rely on as a support network.
“My hope is that students feel like, ‘Wow, look at the community of adults rallying around us to support us through the Winter Term.’ I don’t know how much that resonates with students, but that’s definitely a goal I had in mind. Part of these activities is helping students recognize and realize, ‘Oh my gosh, there are so many adults here who care about us and want to do something nice for us.’ It’s also a chance for them to get exposure to different departments they might not know much about,” said Murata.
Stephenson and Ivory reiterated Murata’s message of student support. Inviting students to participate in the upcoming activities, they emphasized the importance of fostering community on both a cluster and school-wide scale.
“We want to uplift the student body’s spirits [into] a festive holiday mood. The biggest priority of Co-Presidents is the community, so [the Cluster Olympics] is a facet of that,” said Stephenson.
“Cluster Olympics is meant to be an event that is fun, exciting, [and] gets you out of the dorm, as you feel your cluster spirit. It is not just the house you live in, we want to give students the feeling that we are an Andover family,” said Ivory.
