Let’s Kick-Off Homecoming Week
Happy Homecoming Week, Mavericks!
It’s finally October which means Homecoming has finally arrived on campus. For those new to MSU’s Homecoming week, strap in because this week, it’s all about celebrating Maverick pride and traditions with the MSU community.
To begin the highly anticipated week of the year, the Homecoming Kick-Off took place in the CSU mall Monday with a live band performance, free Homecoming merch and the Homecoming Royalties interacting with the student body.
Homecoming-Competitions Chair Bethel Gebregiorgis discussed what the planning process was like for the kick-off.
“The kickoff processing has not been as tedious as the other events, kind of coming up with the theme and everything else. We started working on it last year in March, so it’s been going pretty good so far and we’re looking forward to the other events of the week,” Gebregiorgis said.
This year’s Homecoming theme is “Mavericks: Endgame,” with Gebregioris describing it as a mix of “Comic-Con and Stomper.”
Gebregioris revealed what a new activity that Mavericks can expect throughout this year’s Homecoming week.
“The main thing that we have is the cookie decorating contest, and the new thing that we’re starting this year is a soccer tournament so that’s for international students who can play soccer. And a lot of international students have soccer as their official game back home. So being an international student myself, I wanted to bring that sort of home to this homecoming week.”
Gebregiorgis says celebrating Maverick pride at the university is overall important, especially during Homecoming week as it can be “a very inclusive and all expressive kind of moment.”
“Everybody has their different way of expressing their Maverick pride, and I believe making homecoming inclusive is as important as any other event can be. I believe that it’s supportive and that the importance should be more inclusivity, more events so more people can come and see,” Gebregiorgis said.
For Gebregiorgis, the event she is looking forward to the most is the cookie decorating contest.
“I’m a huge, huge, huge cookie fan so the cookie decorating contest is going to be the most exciting one. And one more surprise for the cookie decorating contest, the things that they’re going to be decorating, I don’t know if they’re ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ fans, it will be the four elements,” Geregiorgis said.
For the Homecoming Royalty candidates in attendance at the kick-off, they were involved by helping promote the court by networking and encouraging students on campus to vote by Thursday for their Royalty which everyone can do by going to MavCentral.
As Royalty candidates, juniors Alex Vang and Shawna Pha share what it means to be a part of the Homecoming court.
“It’s really fun and exciting. It’s a unique experience. It’s a little scary, because I’ve never done anything this extroverted before, but it means just to be part of something bigger than just me as an individual. I’m representing Asian American students. I’m also representing Mavericks and it’s just something fun that we can all kind of come together for,” Vang said.
“I’m really excited for this opportunity and I’m super happy that I can represent Asian American Affairs and Mavericks as a whole,” Pha said.
Both Pha and Shawna will be participating in the annual lip sync battle, MSU’s most exciting Homecoming event that will take place Thursday night in the Bresnan Arena where several campus organizations will be competing to win the first-place trophy.
“We Mavsians have been training really hard. A lot too, so this week is hell week. I’m really excited to see all of our hard work and perform in front of everybody,” Pha said.
“Lip sync is like the big gun of Homecoming. But, it’s really fun, even though training has been really hard; you train pretty much every day from 6:30 to 9. But it’s a great time for us to get to know our peers, and kind of connect to them more on a personal level,” Vang said. “So that whole process and journey of training together has been really fun, because we all start at different skill levels of dancing so it’s just really fun to see everybody grow.”
Now representing the MSU student body, Vang and Pha share what it means to them to celebrate Maverick pride on campus.
“My experience from community college to here at Mankato, it’s very different. At MSU, I feel I have made genuine friendships, genuine connections with not just my peers, but also with faculty too. And I think that’s what I was really missing in community college, because I would just go to class and come back home and I would have little interaction,” Vang said. “I wanted something more. I wanted to enjoy my college years and be able to experience all the fun things that college students get to experience. So being a Maverick just means being a part of a community that supports each other and are all striving to make a bigger impact on the world.”
“Being a Maverick for me is to represent a big community. Inclusivity is a really big thing as a Maverick for me as well,” Pha said.
For information on Homecoming 2024, visit mnsu.edu/homecoming
Photo Caption: To begin the most anticipated week of the year, the Homecoming Kick-Off took place in the CSU mall Monday with a live band performance, free Homecoming merch and the Homecoming Royalties interacting with the student body. (Alexis Darkow/The Reporter)
Write to Anahi Zuniga at anahi.zuniga@mnsu.edu