Cap changes Bicker decision

As eating clubs were conducting pickups the Saturday after Bicker week, a student who had previously been informed that he had been hosed learned that he had actually been accepted.

The student, who was granted anonymity to freely discuss the situation, had bickered both Cap & Gown Club and Cannon Club under the new multi-club bicker system. He received an email from Cannon indicating that he had not been admitted to either club. But later that day, the student attended new members’ activities at Cap.

“It’s still a little hazy how it happened,” the student said, referring to the events that led him to be hosed and later accepted.

Cap was the most bickered and the most selective club on the Street this year, initially accepting 95 of 199 bickerees. On Wednesday, Feb. 13, outgoing Cap treasurer Adi Rajagopalan ’13 requested a correction to the Feb. 10 Daily Princetonian article, noting that the club had actually accepted 96 students.

“With the way the system played out, he did not get into Cap,” outgoing Cap and ICC president Alec Egan ’13 said. “After a little bit of digging, the club decided to take him anyway.

This was the first year students registered for the eating club membership process and ranked their choices on icc2013.princeton.edu, which was intended to synchronize the process. ICC adviser Mark Bur ’08 said that the system ran smoothly this year and that this particular incident was not the result of any sort of error.

“There wasn’t a glitch in terms of someone not being placed in a club that they should have been,” Bur said. “There wasn’t a mistake with the protocol or the algorithm used in the system.” He added that the decision to admit the student “was a decision that the other club made after the fact.”

Egan said that admitting a student after initial decisions are sent out is a common practice among bicker clubs on Prospect Avenue.

Representatives from other bicker clubs said they were not familiar with instances in which their clubs had admitted additional students after decisions had been made.

Despite learning he had been accepted later than most, the student said he was not upset by what he called a mistake.

The fact that this happened to me isn’t necessarily a terrible thing — it’s certainly a story I can share in the future,” the student said. “It wasn’t like I was devastated.”

The student noted that though every system has positive and negative qualities, he believes the multi-club system has many more positive attributes and that his bicker experience was, overall, positive.