It’s already the last week of the campaign! It’s been a crazy ride over the last couple weeks, what with freakishly cold weather for Houston (and even an ice day off of school) and the start of the semester interspersed with Up to Us campaign event planning and execution. In our team’s first blog post, I talked about our motivation to be part of the campaign in order to “burst the bubble” and engage our peers in a conversation about what’s happening beyond the hedges.

I have been so proud, both of the rest of the Rice Up to Us core team and our campus ambassadors, as well as the rest of the Rice population to support our campaign and get involved. Our first event, an improvisation show about the national debt by Rice’s own student group Spontaneous Combustion drew a crowd of over 200 students, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen students laugh that hard and learn that much in the same hour-long show. The Rice Moneythink chapter has hosted “TA” sessions about personal budgeting for approximately 20 students each week, and the Baker Institute Student Forum has led a debate about whether the current level of debt is negative or not. Rice students have been engaging on Facebook, taking our quiz, watching our videos, and signing our petition to the Board of Education, encouraging them to bring the conversation of the national debt into high school economics and civics classes. Our corny pickup line competition was a hit, and we have some other surprises up our sleeve for the last couple days of the campaign. The campaign has certainly been time-consuming, but every time that a student tells me that they learned something new about the national debt, the American economy, or fiscal policy, I know that it’s worth it because we are starting the conversation and preparing our peers for the economy we will be inheriting within the next couple years.

Good luck to the rest of the teams with their campaigns, I have been so impressed by everything I have read and seen about your campaigns thus far! No matter the outcome, I think we are all winners. Keep up the good work!