When the decision as to where a free Weezer concert should be held was left to elective democracy, Penn State fared worse than Ralph Nader.
The T-Mobile Motorola CLIQ Challenge, which allowed students at different colleges to submit votes to win a concert featuring Weezer, ended Monday night with Penn State in eighth place and Florida State University in first.
Students John Khuu (senior-information systems technology) and Rick Knowlton (senior-energy, business and finance) created a Facebook event to help spread word of the opportunity.
Although the two initially found a lot of interest in the event, it ended unsuccessfully, with Penn State finishing behind schools like Florida State University and Grand Valley State University, which have smaller student bodies.
"It was a total failure," said Khuu. "We tried our best, but it's not in our hands. It's in the Penn State student body's hands. We just wanted everyone to know they could have come here -- I'm not sad or anything."
Knowlton said one reason Florida State University had the edge over Penn State was because it had an early start on the voting. By the time Penn State had a single vote, Florida State already had about 3,000, he said.
Another factor was that only half of the students who joined the Facebook event actually officially cast votes, Knowlton said.
"I'm not really sure why that happened, I can only theorize," Knowlton said. "People were maybe not fully aware or maybe blindly not paying attention. If the people who joined voted, we would have had a much better running."
Khuu said the two tried to make the voting instructions as clear as possible, but after a certain number of people joined the event, they could know longer use the "message all" feature and instead had to make subtle changes to the group's name to bring the event back to peoples' newsfeeds.
"The lack of participation, on a personal level, was discouraging," Knowlton said. "We weren't sure what kind of an impact we could make. It was a nice try, but Florida State had their stuff together."
Khuu and Knowlton said they were considering printing flyers to distribute on campus but decided at that point it was too late and Penn State was too far behind in the running.
Khuu said he and Knowlton find the music scene in State College lacking and try to get the word out about events like this in order to help foster greater interest in things like live music.
"There is a music scene here, but it's very underground," Knowlton said. "There's nothing unique or special. That's not to say there's a lack of musical talent -- it's just not organized."
