Shouldn't have been needed or used last year....clearly someone trying to fix a problem that didn't need fixed. It very well could have been turned into a quick lesson on teamwork and ingenuity. Instead, the Class of 2021 will give West Point cannon fodder for years.
This stuff cracks me up. The way it was before, candidates would exit the back of Alumni, place their bags
in a truck, and proceed to get
in a bus, where they would
be driven to the Midstore parking lot. They would then retrieve their bags (which had also been driven to the same point), and carry them up on to red beach.
This year, candidates put their bags on a cart and
walked expeditiously all the way from Alumni to the midstore parking lot, where their carts were then taken from them,
at the same point where they would have gotten off the bus, and then they had to carry their bags for up to red beach, just like the previous classes.
People talk about this being soft, but when you look at it objectively, the plebes of 2021 had to do more work for this evolution than previous classes, including my own. The distance that they carried their carts, I rode in a bus.
Also, while I can appreciate the sentiment that says "They should've just carried the bags on their backs the whole time!", people need to remember that I-day is a complex evolution that involves processing over 1000 people in waves within the span of maybe 10 hours. Sure, it'd be great to have them carry their bags, and if the time constraints permitted it, they would have. But the goal is to get everybody in Bancroft as soon as possible. When you've got plebes like "Susie" who might weigh 120 lbs dripping wet, or "Bob" who ran cross country his whole life and is thin as a stick, carrying bags that are bigger than they are for a quarter of a mile down a fairly narrow hallway, there are going to be some falls/stops. And when Bob and Susie have to stop, then that is going to cause delays for the people behind them, and eventually you get a total log jam of people.
I'm all for making plebe summer harder/more stressful, but for some evolutions speed and efficiency are more important than suck factor.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but due to the construction of Hopper Hall, which is not likely to be finished until September of 2019, I can't foresee a return to the old system this year or the next.