2014 - April 23, Strait to Taiwan

From ATS Wiki

Contents 1 Event Captains 2 Event Overview 3 2014 Shopping List 4 Attendance 5 Notes

Event Captains

• Food (Norman Cao)
• Decorations (Staly Chin)
• Culture (Kevin Ng)
• Logistics (David Wong)

Event Overview

Another year of ATS's famed Strait to Taiwan =). This year we tried to return a little to the roots of the event by building wooden stands and having different people make different signs, which looked really nice! Since this year S2T was not the week after CPW, we took 3 days of food prep instead of 2 to spread out the work a little more, which meant that individual days ended earlier, but also meant that people were more spread out and prep didn't feel as festive.

2014 Shopping List

Food/Shopping List

Google Doc

Attendance

Ticket sales were around $1600

Notes

Contacts

• CAC Stata: Lianne Scott (liscott@mit.edu)
• Campus Dining: Michael (Mike) Myers (myersm@mit.edu)
• Electricity: Paul Wisniewski (wisniew@plant.mit.edu)
  • Point of contact is Paul, the electrician who handled electrical was Michael Mobley (mdmobley@plant.mit.edu). The electrician was there for the beginning of the event during setup and takedown.
• Tech Cash: Card Services, Basement of Student Center
  • Make sure to reserve the card reader VERY early in advance! It's new and easy to use.
• Tim the Beaver: http://studentlife.mit.edu/cac/forms/reserve-tim http://studentlife.mit.edu/cac/forms/reserve-tim

Driver's Guide

• Dont drive on Marathon Monday. There are alternatives. ie. HMart and Super 88
• Zipcar is good for short trips but if keeping it for over 6 hours, might want to consider renting it for the day or using budget car.
• If using budget car, get codes from MIT to get car without satisfying age requirement
  • https://vpf.mit.edu/site/sourcing_procurement/smartbuy/suppliers/budget
• May want to look into Uhaul for large shopping trips

• Shuttling equipment for prep/cleanup
  • Walker
    • Parking at Walker next to tennis courts
    • If comfortable, can actually back down slope to use unloading area for kitchen.
    • Otherwise, side door near parking lot gives easy access to elevator. Dont leave door open for long though. Door has silent alarm that alerts police if left open for a long time.
  • Student Center
    • Can stop in the circle Saferide uses. Might be safer to have driver sit in car though because you cant actually park there for long.
  • McCormick
    • Only 30 min parking without a parking pass. Best to leave someone with the car in case someone comes to ticket the car. (BIG No-No)
    • Word out is McCormick desk called MIT Police on van sitting outside McCormick for a couple hours. Dont do that.

• Chinatown Run
  • $12 for parking in garage near CMart
  • Can consider parking on the curb in the parking lot. Seemed to be a popular practice by locals

• Costco Run
  • Have someone look for a route online and print it out beforehand to minimize stress
  • Mobil version of google maps takes you on a road that doesnt exist, hence stress and confusion
  • Lots of splitting roads. Directions will probably just tell you to go straight. It is ok to stop in the center of the split and figure out where to go. U-turns are hard to come by.

• Shuttling food/equipment day of
  • Budget car opens at 7. Be there before then and wait for them to open to maximize set-up time
  • Might want to invest in a larger car. We used a full sized 4 door. Kind of small for the job
  • Can park on the corner of Vassar and Mass Ave but that's usually full. Huge garage at Whitehead for the same rate I think. (~35 from 10-3)

Logistics

• Reservation issues this year - none
  • got Tim the Beaver, make sure to reserve at least 2 weeks in advance
  • no Girl Scouts yay!
  • CAC and Dining people have real lives, sometimes emails may get back with a “OUT OF OFFICE” response, make sure to contact them during the weekday and between 9am and 5pm

• Reserving Stata
  • Fill out the "Student Space Application." Also contact Lianne directly about reserving the space.
  • Need to fill out an official event description on the MIT event calendar because we get funding
  • In addition to reserving the space, you need to register the event. Go to the Events and Information Center (7-121) to pickup a registration form. There are a lot of carbon copies that you need to get signed by CAC, SAO, the campus police - instructions on the form are really clear. FOR BEST RESULTS, GO AT 9AM WHEN PEOPLE ARE THERE.

• Meeting with Campus Dining - we met with Michael Myers
  • Asked for - tablecloths, serving utensils, ice. Got disposal tablecloths but they arrived after setup, we should still have them in storage. He offered to get us serving utensils but we had enough. No ice because Chartwells only has 1 ice machine that services all three food places in Stata

• TechCASH Machine
  • Reserve the TechCASH machine ASAP, much earlier than two weeks before. TechCASH machine is beautiful (also you get a free iPhone with it, borrowed only)

• Publicity

• Other Logistics
  • Lianne got us nice easels and helped us contact the electricity people. Send her the layout plans. She'll want to know how many easels we want, what appliance wattages are.
  • Electrical has historically cost between $550 and $600. Remember to include in the budget. In 2013, the cost was nearly $1000.

Volunteers

• • Have a laptop at the front booth to let volunteers sign in
  • We paid volunteers 2 tickets/hr. Serving is more important than prep because you need the coverage
  • Serving shifts: 1hr, Prep shifts: 3 hrs (consider changing to 2hrs)
  • Pay volunteers at booth on day of
  • Very few volunteers came to pick up their free tickets on the day of

Food

• DO NOT HAVE ONLY ONE FOOD CAPTAIN, IT ONLY LEADS TO SADNESS. Even if you're reusing recipes, it takes a lot of work to plan the logistics of cooking.
• Chicken Skewers
  • Make more of them. Like, even more. They're cheap, easy, and delicious.
  • Don't sell them at the reduced price ever.
• Zong Zi
  • Needed more microwaves
  • Making the meat was pretty fun, though on a tighter schedule it might not be doable. Look for alternate sources of meat next year
• Pork Rice
  • Get smaller bowls, pork rice went fast
  • Think out the pork to rice ratio more carefully (i.e. measure how big the spoon is; not too hard to do)
• Scallion Pancakes
  • Last to sell out due to cooking issues. Have better size control and make them small
• Dumplings
  • Frozen dumplings from Chinatown are just as cheap as dumplings from Costco, but taste like 10x better. However, they need to be cooked in water; they cannot be simply fried. Consider an additional hot plate at the dumpling station (this means the electrical layout needs to get changed!)
• Tea Eggs
  • Went pretty well; there are complete tea egg tea/seasoning boxes in Chinatown, those were pretty useful (though you might want to add a little more sugar and soy sauce)
• Shaved Ice
  • Bring can openers... It's easy to forget about Shaved Ice since it doesn't require prep beforehand, but don't!
• Mochi
  • WE HAVE LEARNED A NEW WAY TO MANUFACTURE MOCHI!!!!
    • Step 1: Make Mochi Mix, Microwave as usual
    • Step 2: Dump out the entire bowl onto parchment paper, flatten, then put filling in a grid
    • Step 3: Fold the mochi over then use a knife to cut into bite size pieces.
• Boba Tea
  • Used lychee jelly jars to store/transport, which works pretty well, but can get leaky.

Non-food

• Pachinko was constructed, with ATS painted on it
  • Rules: Win Condition: <= 25 || >=54
  • Slots marked with numbers 1-9, with two fives on the very ends because those are the most likely
  • Made of 1x3s and two boards
  • attracted really cute little kids and some interested members
  • could make it more obvious that it was free to play
  • had many prizes such as fish lanterns, pikachu keychains, and fancy chopsticks
  • gave bouncy balls away as consolation
  • Running high and low score on piece of foam board

• Calligraphy
  • used the wishing tree's leftover wish paper to write on
  • asked Eva Yeung to man the booth and teach people
  • attracted quite a few little kids
  • Jeff Chen wrote the beautiful calligraphy sign

• Lion Dance
  • Need to make sure Lion Dance can provide manpower to man their own booth
  • Point of contact will be Kevin Ng next year

Decorations

• Stands were brought back! They are now collapsible and made of 1x3s in order to make carrying from Walker easier and less manpower intensive. They still require clamps, though 2" ones instead of the big orange ones we found in student storage.
  • 12 stands were made, one for each 30"x72" table
  • Span 6' wide and have 3' legs, which should be shortened to 30" so that people don't bump into the protruding ends

• Signs for each booth were "crowd sourced", so instead of one or two people making them all, we gave every person one sign to work on and make in order to give the illusion of multiple small booths, independent of each other, competing in a marketplace. Signs like "Only 1 ticket!" and "No MSG" were made.
  • Posters from previous years were reused because they were in good enough condition
  • Most items were taped onto the foam core in order to preserve the foam core in case we want to use it again
  • Predominantly 20x30 white foam core, could use some more black ones
  • Should make a large-ish sign to advertise TechCash machine. A lot of people didn't realize we took TechCash

• Lanterns were not put up