Party Planning: Part 1

Each year in my program it is tradition that the 2nd year students throw a party for the 3rd year students when they finish the candidacy exam (a.k.a. generals, or the most frightening thing ever) and for the new 1st year students since they are just arriving. Well, it turns out that I'm now a 2nd year, so I get to help throw this party with my other 2 classmates. I'm pretty excited about the whole thing because I love throwing parties, although in the back of my mind I keep thinking how I will be a tortured student taking this exam next year...

Anyway, my cohort and I have been working on the party stuff for about 2 weeks, although we've been talking it up all summer (we're quite motivated to put on a great party). Over the weekend we finally began our shopping, which consisted mostly of gifts for the 3rd years. I don't think I'll spoil the surprise too much if I write about it, so here it goes...

These gifts are mostly silly, and we've dubbed them the "Post-Generals Survival Kit." Each of them contains several important items, which we've nicely tried to relate to social psychology (yes, it's nerdy). First, we have little bottles of liquor for emotion regulation. These can be used to drown away one's sorrows that often arise after the exam, or they can be used to increase the joy and euphoria that one may feel upon finishing  a significant part of grad school. Either way, decreasing negative feelings and increasing positive ones are both good :-) Next, we decorated some lovely beer mugs for use at the party (and whenever the emotion regulation is needed). There are also small bags of coffee to help motivate the 3rd years if they start to get into the dreaded post-generals slump. We actually found coffee that was called "foglifter" :-D There are also framed pictures of each of the 3rd years' advisors. These can also serve as motivation, and they have phrases like "get motivated" and "be afraid" written on them. Finally, because the 3rd years like lunch and margaritas, we got them gift cards to Mad Mex. I'm not sure if this will serve as social facilitation or promote social loafing amongst them, but I think they will enjoy it regardless :-)

The almost-put-together gifts

Today we also went shopping for food and the drinks (and probably looked crazy buying a cartful of booze at 1:30pm on a Wednesday). Unfortunately, as a result of this, I think all of our wallets are hurting. It's really difficult to determine how much we need for this sort of thing. We invited 60 people, and obviously not all, but most will come. I'm pretty good at having enough food, but the drinks are another issue. Some people don't care for alcohol at all while others can drink all night. The first party I threw, I bought all of the alcohol, but I wised up after that and just do BYO now. So here is what we bought...

Mountain of Booze

We have a variety of beers and what I like to call "girly drinks." There's Mike's Hard Lemonade, Smirnoff Ice, Bud Light, Miller Light, Pabst, Sam Adams, Heineken, and Blue Moon totaling 138 bottles and cans. Then, we have tequila, vodka in regular and vanilla, and rum in regular and mango. Of course we also have plenty of things to mix them with. Whew! I hope it's enough!

Despite being beyond broke now, I am very excited about the whole thing. We also have some good food planned, but I'll post about that later...Prepping begins tomorrow!