Students Organizing the Multiple Arts (SOMA) got more than it bargained for, including students with minor injuries, when Pittsburgh's Greg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, came to HUB Alumni Hall on Thursday.
Throngs of students flocked to the HUB to wait for the SOMA-organized free show, which was first-come, first-serve. The line spread across the first floor, wrapping from the front doors of Alumni Hall to the stairs.
Hype for the concert has been growing since before Gillis's appearance was even confirmed two days ago. Though the official Facebook group for the event asked concertgoers not to arrive before 8 p.m. for the 10 p.m. show, the line started forming well before that time, HUB nighttime weekend supervisor Peggy Diaz said.
"By 8 we had over 400 people already," she said. "We've got a lot of kids who aren't students here, because you don't need to show your ID."
Diaz said the maximum capacity for the show would be 1,200. SOMA Vice President Danny Michelson said his organization had paid "several hundred dollars" to have the side rooms of Alumni Hall opened to allow the largest possible amount of people in to see the show.
"We knew we were going to get a lot of people but we didn't know it was going to be like this," he said.
As the 10 p.m. start time neared, the crowd began to get rowdy, pushing and jostling toward the doors, while several students crowd-surfed.
"The crowd is- a lot bigger than we were expecting," SOMA president Tim Knapton said. "Things are taking longer than we thought."
Penn State Police Sgt. Brian Bittner said despite the large number of students gathered in the HUB, he anticipated no problems.
"It's a very mellow, laid-back crowd," Bittner said. "Basically what we're here for is just to watch over the crowd, because it's very large."
The doors opened soon after 10 p.m., with students initially filing in one by one. Soon, however, the crowd began to force its way through the doors, at one point bowling over a member of the event staff. Michelson said more than 1,200 students managed to get inside the hall before the staff closed the doors.
The wake of the rush left a few students with minor injuries. A pillar and two of Alumni Hall's doors also sustained damage. The group that didn't make it inside slowly dispersed, though a few disgruntled students remained.
"My friend got here at 9:45 and he's in there," Emily McKenna (freshman-division of undergraduate studies) said. "And I'm not."
Some students who did get inside the hall said they'd only heard about the show through word of mouth.
"I had never heard of Girl Talk until about two hours ago," Alex Wakefield (junior-life sciences) said. "I heard about it from a friend." Wakefield added she'd been knocked down and stepped on when the crowd pushed into the hall.
Sarah Peck (freshman-engineering) said she'd also never heard of Girl Talk but had expected the student turnout to be high for the show.
"I wasn't planning on coming because I thought it would be like this," Peck said.
