Outdoor Action named finalist for $10,000 Polartec prize

Polartec has announced Princeton University’s Outdoor Action program as one of its finalists in this year’s Made Possible Challenge, putting Outdoor Action in the running for a $10,000 prize.

A leading manufacturer of fleece and athletic performance garments, Polartec will award the monetary grant to one collegiate outdoor program, in addition to selections from its brand-name apparel line.

To enter the challenge, outdoor program members from colleges across the nation created videos with footage of the highlights of their outdoor programs and proposed how they would spend $10,000 to develop and further the scope of their programs.

The winning school is determined by public voting, which is set to end on Jan. 31 at midnight. Voters may vote up to once a day.

At Princeton, five Outdoor Action leaders — Ines Sheppard ’12, Michelle Oresky ’12, Eliza Harkins ’14, Mark Whelan ’14 and Erisa Apantaku ’14 — worked together to produce a music video featuring footage and photographs from Outdoor Action’s Frosh Trips, the pre-orientation program that attracted about 60 percent of the Class of 2015.

According to Sheppard, the video tried to convey “the idea that we want OA to be something that’s more expansive and involves more people in the Princeton community ... You have a lot of people who do it their freshman year and can’t do it anymore.”

While the University’s program currently consists of freshman trips, Outdoor Action’s proposal included expanding its activities during the year to include weekend trips such as whitewater rafting, kayaking, winter camping, caving and more.

“We had the idea of what we wanted the money for,” Whelan explained. “We wanted to get the point across that OA is really good at running Frosh Trips, but there are other things during the year that we want to do, because OA is very Frosh Trip-based.”

Harkins added that, considering how pervasive OA is in the campus consciousness, it made sense to expand the sense of OA community and “take Princeton students out of their normal academic context.”

Oresky wrote the lyrics to the song for the music video, while Roaring 20 collaborated in producing the music. The lyrics describe the challenges and excitements of Outdoor Action trips. One verse says, “Just don’t stop; let’s keep the momentum; keep OA going all year long.”

With the grant, the group hopes to invest in training leaders and subsidizing the costs of some of the trips so that a wider range of students have the opportunity to experience the outdoors.

“I think that’s the main idea — that OA becomes something that everyone on campus can be involved in, not just leaders or freshmen,” Sheppard said.

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Princeton’s video is competing against the videos of three other finalist schools — Lyon College, Northeastern University and Skidmore College.

“We wanted to tell the people at Polartec and the Facebook users who watch our video that we have the unique opportunity to turn a vast amount of students into outdoors people for life. All we need are the resources — in this case $10,000,” Apantaku explained.

They are currently advertising their video around campus to gain publicity and votes before voting closes.

“We already made this video,” Harkins said. “We will do what it takes to win.”