Harvey Mudd College has won an online voting competition to bring pop country singer Taylor Swift to campus for a free concert in October.<\/p>\n
Swift will give a live, acoustic performance that also will be filmed as part of a VH1 Storytellers series to air Nov. 11 at 6 p.m. ET\/PT and 11 p.m. ET\/PT.<\/p>\n
The online voting competition was open to U.S. colleges and high schools, and voting took place over the past month.<\/p>\n
HMC sophomores Travis Beckman and Yeahmoon Hong, both enthusiastic Swift fans, rallied votes from fellow students at HMC and the other Claremont Colleges by creating a Facebook event and inviting friends to join and vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cI follow Taylor Swift on Twitter and, in August, she posted about the concert competition so I went immediately to Facebook and started an event the same day,\u201d said Beckman. \u201cWe set about inviting everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFacebook was the ultimate networking site, amazing for quickly networking friends, friends of friends, family members and faculty,\u201d said Hong. \u201cIn fact, I heard that several Mudd faculty were also voting in the Taylor On Campus Contest. It was an excellent way of bringing solidarity to a common cause among people that didn’t even know each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beckman read through the entire rulebook to see if winning was even a possibility. He originally thought that chances were slim, but then saw that the competition normalized the voting by school population. He realized HMC, with its small size, had a shot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was posting once a day on Facebook trying to get people to vote,\u201d Beckman said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t some big orchestrated thing\u2014it was just two fans who got the word out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beckman and Hong mixed a little Shakespeare with Tolkien to motivate friends to vote, writing: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; The 5C’s have a chance of winning this if we unite and put together our powers. We have a way of bringing Taylor Swift to our campus!…This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth I bid you stand, Women and Men of the West (Coast)!”<\/p>\n
Beckman checked the Taylor Swift On Campus webpage every day, and then every hour in the lead-up to the announcement of the winning school. \u201cI was hitting refresh over and over, and when I saw we won, I ran out of my suite at 7 a.m. and screamed \u2018Taylor Swift\u2019s coming to Mudd!\u2019”<\/p>\n
Hong was equally ecstatic when he saw that HMC had won the concert.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up listening to Taylor Swift, and often listened to her songs during the long homework hours of HMC\u2019s Summer Math Program,\u201d Hong said. \u201cWe can now see and hopefully meet her in person. I am looking forward to enjoying the concert with my friends. Personally, it was my friends who encouraged us to make the Facebook page so that we could vote for the contest.\u201d<\/p>\n
The concert is sponsored by Swift, Papa John\u2019s and Chegg, an online textbook rental company, in partnership with VH1, CoverGirl and American Greetings. In addition to the concert, Swift and Chegg\u2019s philanthropic program, Chegg for Good, is donating $10,000 to the music departments of each of the five schools that acquired the most votes: HMC, Seton High School in Cincinnati, Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose, Terra Environmental Research Institute in Miami and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.<\/p>\n
HMC is discussing how best to invest the grant to enhance student opportunities in music.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a typical Mudder\u2014I\u2019ve got mid-terms to prepare for,\u201d said Beckman. \u201cBut once that weekend hits, I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll be able to sit still for more than a few seconds at a time. It\u2019s going to be amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n