This year’s Grand Marshal Week, to many, was a bit of a disappointment. There was, of course, the controversy regarding the tampering of campaign materials posted around campus, but aside from that, GM Week 2015 was, at least in our opinion, poorly planned, and not nearly as fun as last year’s or the one two year’s ago.

The GM Week mugs, traditionally a staple of elections, were supplanted by “GM Week jars,” which had neither handles nor lids. This was a major change from the mugs of previous years, which were mugs, and it was a very large departure from last year’s 25-ounce mugs. For comparison, this year’s jars are about 12 ounces.

In addition to the rather jarring departure from the mugs and cups of previous years, the events of GM Week 2015 were rather poorly handled. Many events, including the annual Provost Barbecue, were not publicized well, and the calendar on the GM Week website was often bereft of correct or up-to-date information. Many events that were listed were also located at inconvenient locations on campus, such as the East Campus Athletic Village, as opposed to the Armory or in front of the Voorhees Computing Center, as it was in previous years. Also, the theme for this year’s events were a bit unclear in The Poly’s eyes. Was it Mardi Gras? New Orleans? Jazz? New Orleans Jazz? We don’t know! Also, after the theme reveal at the last home hockey game, it was barely advertised at all!

While we do recognize the effort that went into producing GM Week 2015, we feel that the committee did a poor job this year compared to previous years. There was a Facebook page created for GM Week, but there were barely any updates, unless it was last minute. Unlike previous years, the Rensselaer Union page on Facebook was the group that created the event, usually the GM Week committee creates the GM Week event pages and posts about them on the RPI Facebook pages to let everyone know about the events, but this year, it was poorly maintained and barely advertised to the RPI community. Not even Reddit had any postings regarding the events for the week.

We hope that next year’s planning committee analyzes what went poorly this year, determines how to resolve these issues, and properly implements these solutions.