February 3, 2014
Read time : 2 min

The clock read a quarter to noon and five freshman nervously stacked boxes of Pizza Mercato next to an array of Chips Ahoy and Sprite. In fifteen minutes, the NYU Up to Us campaign would officially launch. The team had established a web presence with hundreds of views on carefully crafted YouTube videos and over a thousand likes on their Facebook page—but the event set to begin in fifteen minutes would prove something beyond a simple internet presence: could this team move their peers to participate beyond a convenient click on their news feeds? Would their message resonate enough to reach beyond social media and garner a living, breathing presence?

And in fifteen minutes, the answer was yes. The room filled. First, a trickle of a few here and there. Then, larger groups of four, five, six, until the door kept opening, and the seats filled with students talking, chewing—then listening.

As team leader Jai Malik described the issue and our place within it, agreeing heads nodded and pondering eyes wandered. In this room, UC-25, on a Friday afternoon, students of all political ideologies came together to listen to a common message. Whether blue or red, we all mixed into a perfect… violet.