The Battalion — March 7, 2024

Behind the scenes of Big Event

A&M to host ‘largest one-day, student-run service project’ in nation

By Mia Putnam @MiaBatt25

Over 10,000 Texas A&M students, faculty, staff and College Station residents volunteer each year in the Big Event. Since 1982, Big Event has been helping merge the gap between Bryan-College Station residents and A&M through a day of service including helping residents with painting, gardening and other needed services.

This year, Big Event staff members said it would be the largest yet, with over 370 internal staff coordinating around 15,000 volunteers to serve 2,300 local residents.

These 370 staff members stay busy leading up to the 42nd annual Big Event. Big Event Director and psychology senior Tara Driskill said

planning the event is difficult.

“The most challenging piece of planning and executing the Big Event is ensuring that all of the numbers line up between tools, our staff having enough staff to go to all of the residents’ homes … making sure that the number of students match the number of the needs of residents,” Driskill said. Within the Big Event program, there are six committees where student staff members are placed. These committees all work together to plan, and Driskill said they had to coordinate seamlessly over a year to plan the city-wide event.

“It really is a year-long process,” Driskill said. “Our director is chosen every April after the Big Event is done in March. They choose their executive team, and they work through the summer to formulate a vision for what they want the Big Event to look like. We get committee and staff in September, and then we hit the ground running with accepting residents sign ups starting in late August and those close early

February.

“So, from that time, we are doing job checks which is where we go to the residents’ home and get a bit more information about what their needs are … Lots of different moving parts that come together on March 23,” Driskill said.

Driskill said all students, staff, faculty and members of the community are invited to sign up for the Big Event.

“[Volunteers] will get an email the week of with a resident biography with who they are serving so they can get to know them a little bit better and are encouraged to contact them before the day of,” Driskill said.

Volunteers can expect speeches from University President Mark Welsh and football coach Mike Elko, free food and music performances at the kick-off ceremony.

“Then students will get their tools and go out and serve,” Driskill said. “What the job site looks like is two-fold. The students will do the actual tangible tasks that they can

help the resident with that they are less capable of doing than able-bodied college students are, and it is also an opportunity for residents to connect with students. It is a really good opportunity for students to get outside of their college bubble.”

While conducting a check at a job site, two staff members, Driskill and finance junior Blake Guerra, asked a local resident what she would need done around her house on the Big Event day including painting and planting in her front yard.

Rachel DeLeon, a teacher at Rudder High School, said she has positive memories from previous years where students came to her house for Big Event. “I had a group that was so fun and they were an organization themselves,” DeLeon said. “They came out and we took pictures together and they painted. It was really fun.”

DeLeon said that she looks forward to students visiting her house for the Big Event.

“I really enjoy it,” DeLeon said. “I used to work on campus at the

medical school, and then I worked in the evening with the student athletes. I just really missed students and student life and college life … I just really enjoy it, but I don’t have any connection to it right now. I don’t have time to go to the games and it’s nice to be connected with Aggies.”

They met a woman while volunteering in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Driskill said, they swapped stories and formed a connection.

“We have served her every year since and I go to her house once a month and go help her with a few things,” Driskill said. “It’s maybe not the most remarkable story, but I think it is a really special story of connection that if I have that story of connection and I am one person in an organization of almost 400 people that has existed for 42 years and exists on hundreds of campuses across the nation, imagine how many stories of connection there are.”

The Big Event office decorated with memorabilia and awards on Friday, March 1, 2024.

What is a “sad girl?”

Back in the day, there was this archaic microblog thing called Tumblr where the sad girl subculture made its iconic debut. Demarcated by hashtags like #Prettywhenyoucry, this movement consisted of Lana Del Rey lyrics, black-and-white photos exhibiting sad captions and motifs including — but not limited to — cigarettes, drugs and self-harm.

The Tumblr sad girls would simply post a stream of consciousness into the void. But any collective interest in Artic Monkeys or hopelessly flawed female protagonists, as Mina Le puts it, “felt more like coincidence than a calculated attempt to aestheticize our own identities.”

In comparison, modern teens are so transfixed with chicly alluding to mental instability that “depressedgirl aesthetic” is its own auto-fill on the TikTok search engine — and it has over 17.6 million posts.

This transformation of the sad girl to the “aesthetically depressed girl” is characterized by an overt display of romanticized mental

illness. Girls will post dramatic greyscale snapshots of themselves reading Sylvia Plath or Oscar Wilde with a voiceover saying, “She was depressed and sad and alone … didn’t really have friends,” while melancholic music plays in the background. Sometimes it’ll be a loop of Megan Fox trying to hold back her tears with a caption about nonchalantly dissociating, or a clip of Alexa Demie sobbing and broken after her boyfriend abused her with lyrics of “Can you help me / I think I’m drowning” cycling on repeat.

The promotion of this sort of content has resulted in a perverse culture that reinforces mental illness as an aesthetic. But where do these crazed teen girls get the means to create this content in the first place?

TV shows, films and music videos have always played into a certain image, whether inadvertently or not, when it came to portraying the beautiful but mentally tormented girl.

One immediately thinks of the iconic films “Girl, Interrupted” or “Jennifer’s Body,” but more recently we can take a look at Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria” and “The Idol.”

The former stars Zendaya as Rue, a drug addict who suffers from bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive

disorder. As the show’s protagonist, her tears drip with glitter, her frequent pill-popping is accompanied by dramatically reverent music and every time she helps someone else it serves as justification for her own self-destruction.

In “The Idol,” Lily-Rose Depp plays Jocelyn, a singer who recently dealt with the death of her mother amongst other trauma. The opening scene depicts her erotically writhing atop a table, wearing nothing but half a robe with empty pill bottles and uncorked tequila handles sprawled all around her. Though her dainty wrist is decorated with a hospital band that alludes to a recent mental breakdown so severe it required hospitalization, it goes unnoticed in her shockingly sexual presence.

In case it wasn’t clear, all of these characters look inhumanely perfect.

Hollywood casts these breathtakingly beautiful women as stars in shows that are supposed to depict coming of age. As a consequence, they’re serving as role models to the millions of young teens watching. The problem is that when these gorgeous girls do drugs, drink, induce vomit, self-harm or exhibit other symptoms of mental instability, they’re always glamorous.

Whether it’s through extravagant makeup, flashing neon lighting or the sexualization of

girls truly suffering, producers are quick to employ universal qualities to fit these characters into a romanticized aesthetic that makes being mentally ill cool.

On the one hand, this glamorization completely diminishes what it actually means to suffer from mental illness and incentivizes the people who need help the most to not seek it. After all, who wouldn’t want to be described as “so Lana Del Rey?” On the flip side, those who don’t grapple with mental illness at all are encouraged to either become mentally ill or induce symptoms of it to be more interesting, aesthetic or to simply fit in.

The suffocating and harmful reality of deteriorating mental health has become commodified as an aesthetic for girls to try on as if it were no more than an outfit.

Depression has been reduced to pretty girls leaving red lipstick stains on cigarettes and reading Sylvia Plath. Anorexic? It’s okay, you’re just as disciplined and beautiful as a ballerina. Anxious? Do drugs and get plastered like all unstable popular kids on TV. Pushed to the edge and thinking of committing suicide?

At least you’re pretty when you cry.

Isabella Garcia is an economics sophomore and opinion writer for The Battalion.

cash for clothes

Fresh o a blowout 9-2 win over No. 24 Texas in the depths of Austin and a 7-3 comeback against Texas Southern, No. 4 Texas A&M baseball heads back to Blue Bell Park from March 8-10 for a weekend series against Rhode Island.

Head coach Jim Schlossnagle is now 3-1 against the Longhorns during his time in College Station. The win also propelled the Aggies into the No. 4 slot in the country after ranking No. 7 heading into Longhorn territory.

The batting and pitching stats speak volumes when examining how and why this team is o to such a hot start. The undefeated 12-0 Maroon and White are 16th in the country in batting average at .331, No. 1 in runs earned and tied for 11th in total runs.

While the o ense improved greatly with the addition of notable transfers graduate LF Hayden Schott and junior OF Braden Montgomery, the bullpen from last season has returned, led by pitching coach Max Wiener, nally proved to viewers they can still shut down a ranked team’s o ense.

The Aggie pen held No. 24 Texas to just six hits for two runs, with the addition of 12 strikeouts spread across four pitchers.

The standout performer on the mound against the Longhorns was sophomore LHP Shane Sdao, who struck out six batters throughout two innings pitched. Sdao gave up only one hit and allowed no runs in his career-high strikeout night.

Looking ahead to the rst game of the matchup against Rhode Island on Friday, the Rams enter the game at 2-7, with a single-series game win against Washington State and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

The Rams gave up over 11 runs on average and only managed to score more than four runs in a game twice this season. With that combination of poor pitching and giving up double-digit runs, the Fightin’ Farmers’ batting lineup should be licking its lips for the upcoming home series against this struggling squad.

The Aggies are already outperforming their D1 Baseball preseason prediction by sliding into the Top 5 in the country after D1 slated them to nish at No. 8.

After falling short in the Stanford Regional at the end of the 2023 season, Schlossnagle’s squad is already making waves early, priming themselves to push past prior years’ expectations.

Photos

Top: Sophomore LHP Shane Sdao (38) reacts after a strikeout during Texas A&M’s game against Texas at Disch-Falk Field on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. Middle: Junior RHP Chris Cortez (10) enters his windup during Texas A&M’s game against Texas. Bottom: Freshman INF Jack Bell (1) celebrates a double play during Texas A&M’s game against Texas.

Right: Graduate OF Hayden Schott (5) gives a young fan an autograph after Texas A&M’s victory against Texas.

Aggies look for SEC revival

Projected first out of NCAA Tournament, it’s desperate times for A&M basketball

By Ian Curtis @Texiancurtis

It’s do-or-die time for Texas A&M women’s basketball.

The Aggies are projected as the first team out of the NCAA Tournament field according to ESPN’s latest bracketology — and having lost five of their last six games, they aren’t trending up the bubble.

A&M heads to Greenville, South Carolina for the SEC Tournament desperately needing a resume boost ahead of Selection Sunday.

And that starts with limiting its mistakes.

Control the errors

Watching the Aggies in the latter half of conference play has been a bit like watching your 8-year-old cousin play Whac-A-Mole at the local arcade — they’re getting there, but they can’t quite plug all of the holes fast

enough.

A&M opens SEC tournament play against Mississippi State on March 7. In the Aggies’ 74-63 loss to the Bulldogs on Feb. 4, the mole of the day was turnovers: A&M’s 22 turnovers led to 23 Bulldog points off turnovers, which proved to be the difference maker in an otherwise close game.

“We turned it over in the first quarter, the second quarter — I mean, we turned it over the entire game,” A&M coach Joni Taylor said. “When you’re playing a team that’s that good, you can’t give them the basketball.”

In its next two games, A&M limited itself to 15 turnovers each.

At other times, the problem has been rebounding. In a Feb. 29 road loss to Tenneseee, the Aggies were out-rebounded 44-28 by the Volunteers after dominating the boards in the teams’ earlier matchup.

The pieces are there for a great game, and maybe even a great tournament run. A&M just has to put it all together.

The Endyia Rogers question

Graduate guard Endyia Rogers has been out of the Aggies’ lineup since she suffered a knee injury in A&M’s game against Kentucky

on Feb. 11. She still leads the Aggies in points per game.

If Rogers is back for the SEC Tournament — Taylor has said Rogers’ injury is long-term, but not necessarily season-ending — that’s an immediate boost for the Aggies. If not, then someone else is going to have to step up as a scoring threat. Lately, it’s been a rotating cast of characters who are able to turn into 20-point scoring threats for a game.

Against Tennessee, it was freshman G Solé Williams who put up a season-high 21 points in the road loss. In the Alabama game, it was senior G Aicha Coulibaly who led the Aggies with 19 points.

“We’re starting to figure out how to play without Endyia [Rogers],” Taylor said after the loss to the Tide. “In terms of lack of turnovers, we are handling the ball better and getting into a bit of a chemistry groove so that makes me feel better, but we’ve got to close out games.”

Of course, those both ended up as losses, but they were close losses to teams currently projected in the NCAA Tournament field.

Put these things together, and A&M has enough to make it past Mississippi State in

Greenville — and if it wins, the Aggies run straight into a double-edged sword in their next game.

A nightmare — or an opportunity?

No. 1 South Carolina is still undefeated — the only NCAA division I basketball team, men’s or women’s, that can claim such a title. And its No. 1 seed in the SEC Tournament means it faces the winner of A&M-Mississippi State in its first game.

Last time the Aggies matched up against the Gamecocks, it was the visitors who took home a 99-64 win in College Station — and facing South Carolina in the state of South Carolina, where it’s guaranteed a home crowd despite Greenville being a “neutral site” — will be a challenge.

But if A&M upsets the Gamecocks, it won’t be sweating on Selection Sunday. That’s the resume booster teams dream of in March, one that the NCAA Selection Committee will have no choice but to acknowledge.

Most teams’ One Shining Moment happens during the Big Dance — but if A&M is able to pull off a run in the SEC Tournament, it’ll already have its moment locked up long before March Madness even begins.

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