Today is the start of the biggest social event that will take place at the GSB, the Challenge for Charity (C4C) Weekend. This event brings B-school students from UCLA, Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, Pepperdine, University of Washington, and USC together for a weekend of sports, partying, and overall fun all in the spirit of giving to a few great charities.

As I’ve written in here before, I’m a part of the planning committee for it, so it’s going to be a long weekend, but it’ll be one that becomes on of the big memories for the school year. My job was to coordinate the volunteer activities for the weekend and it was a lot more challenging than I anticipated. It wasn’t too difficult dealing with the other schools because they handled their own volunteer schedules and just sent them to me to consolidate for the weekend. The tough part was trying to get volunteers here at the GSB. I had assumed that I would only have to send out a couple of emails and tons of GSB students would come out of the woodwork to sign up. That didn’t happen. Because we’re the host for the event, we had to get 8-10 times as many volunteers as the other schools and trying to fill 80+ spots was a hell of a feat. We ended up getting enough people to fill the crucial spots, but that was after the rest of the planning committee came through for me and made miracles happen in terms of bringing in folks just at the nick of time.

This afternoon was like a zoo with the students from the 8 schools converging onto the GSB campus to get checked-in and ready for the events. I was a little worried about how things would go because I didn’t know if all the volunteers would arrive at the right times but it all worked out well. Everything from the registration/check-in process to the C4C LPF worked out like a well-oiled machine. Judging from what I saw this afternoon, we’re well on the way to putting on a great show for the students who’ve come from all over the west coast to the GSB.

One of the wildest parts of the C4C Weekend is the Trivia Bowl that took place earlier this afternoon. Usually, one would think that a trivia competition would be relatively tame, but not this one…people were in the audience at all the competitions like they were watching the NCAA Tourney. As I watched it, I was amazed by the obscure facts that were asked about and, even more surprised at how many of those facts the contestants knew. After a while, it seemed that the audience’s cheering started taking more of the attention than the actual Trivia Bowl itself. The GSB’s team blazed through its first two matches but was defeated in the quarterfinals by USC’s squad, who had some kids on it that just seemed like they’d been training in trivia stuff for the past 20 years. This was a great way to start up the weekend of competitions that will continue for the next couple of days. I’ll try to add a couple more entries over the course of the weekend to let you guys know what’s up here.