Over 9 days of Recess Week, we launched our first-ever NUSummiteers – a digital challenge for participants to clock their elevation gained and stand a chance to get on the leaderboard to win prizes! Visit our microsite for a round-up of the entire event here.
We tried to mimic how mountaineers would climb a mountain but in the context of a low-lying Singapore. Hence, activities like hiking, running, climbing the stairs and climbing were encouraged for clocking their elevation gained.
Covid-19 has very much rolled back travel plans for the club this year, cancelling our Summer BAMC (last semester) and prospective Winter Trips but through this all, we are thankful to have the most participative Summiteers! We were delighted to see digital submissions of our participants hiking with their friends, trying out top-rope climbing, challenging themselves by climbing flights and flights of stairs. Witnessing our Summiteers going beyond their usual routine with some hiking for hours daily and others climbing 100+ storeys of stairs, we are gratified to be able to provide an opportunity to explore beyond their boundaries.
We wanted to bring to the community the lessons from the mountains even when it is inaccessible. We were also inspired by Singaporean pioneer climber, Mr. Chua Chee Beng who shared with us about his Project Climb On! back in the 2000s where within 24 hours, the participants managed to cumulatively climb the height of Mount Everest (8,848m) to raise funds for their overseas climbing trip.
For this being the first time MIR has kickstarted a fully digital challenge, there could have been places for improvement but it has been a great success and brought meaningfulness to us to be able to contribute to the NUS community.
We’ve probably said this too many times but once again, thank you for being a part of NUSummiteers! We hope that if you had, you had taken something beneficial away from this event and we look forward to seeing you in our future events!
This event could not have been successful without the current MIR20 ExCo members and from the bottom of my heart (non-exhaustive):
Thank You Nat for sitting down and legitimising the proposal from nothingness with me, updating registrations and manually sending out confirmation emails daily, photo-taking the exclusive event tee, following through with all the administrative work from pre-event to post-event, for creating mountaineering content to be shared, creating the microsite, for checking in with me and improving wherever was possible!
Thank You Chiew for your hours poured into drawing, designing and editing all the graphics for NUSummiteers (especially the T-shirts to all Instagram posts) from a blank piece of paper into solid designs that should be patented, for getting so many of your friends to join this event, for data entering countless submissions daily and for checking in with me constantly!
Thank You Walter for the sleepless nights taking BotFather into another level, creating a fully functional Telegram bot within a few weeks which digital submissions could be submitted easily, sharing mountaineering content and eventually providing live leaderboard updates through the bot!
Thank You Charmaine for being our T-shirt model, for always being prompt with creating publicity materials alongside Chiew and for being timely throughout to update the leaderboard graphic!
Thank You Gawain for packing the goodie bags and spending the 9 days reviewing the screenshots and climbing videos sent in, keying in the data along with Chiew, Chong Yong and Bryan and subsequently messaging participants to help them with troubleshooting!
Thank You Chong Yong for going down to collecting the 100Plus or else we will never have it because of complicated Covid-19 regulations and for reviewing the data daily which was a lot of manual work!
Thank You Bryan for delivering us fuel, honour you for welfare and reviewing the data daily too!
Thank You Wei Sheng for being our T-shirt model, for following up with the invoices and being prompt when meetings are called for!
Written By: Ophelia Ong (Project Director, NUSummiteers)
NUS Mountaineering 