A&E

The Dangerously Awesome Scavenger Hunt is making its nationwide debut at Northwestern on Saturday.

Founded by Danny Ruderman, an independent college counselor based in Los Angeles, The DASH is a three-hour school-wide scavenger hunt.

“This isn’t a scavenger hunt that has anything to do with drinking or anything illegal,” Ruderman said. “It’s literally just stupid fun, sort of messy, something you’d want to do with all of your friends on a Saturday afternoon just to laugh. A lot.”

Ruderman said he chose NU as the first school to hold The DASH out of convenience.

“I have students at colleges literally all over the country wanting to play this, but they’re on semester,” Ruderman said. “They were finishing up in May so what I had to do was target schools on the quarter system.”

Teams of five students each will be given a list of items to complete to earn points, said Allie Levitan, co-head representative of The DASH at NU. Ruderman was Levitan’s college counselor.

The items will not be NU-specific, the Communication sophomore said. Examples include doing a poetry reading of a rap song in public, getting a lock of red hair and eating a stick of butter.

Ruderman was inspired to create The DASH after he participated in a 24-hour scavenger hunt called The Game as an undergraduate at Stanford University, which he told his college students about.

“It’s just ridiculous and huge and a lot of the campus plays it,” he said. “My college students said, ‘Oh my gosh that sounds like fun! I wish we had a scavenger hunt like that on campus.’ … And as a result of that conversation I thought about it … and that’s where The DASH came from.”

At the end of The DASH, the team with the most points will win $1,000 to split among members and an additional $1,000 to donate to the charity of their choice, Levitan said.

Although joining The DASH costs $75 per team, three teams will have their fees refunded if they win the competition for best team name, best costume or best overall theme. The winners for the three awards will be revealed just before the scavenger hunt starts, Levitan said.

All communication from The DASH headquarters, which is based in L.A., will be through Snapchat. Teams must add DASH HQ on Snapchat, and on the day of the hunt, DASH HQ will directly send each team the list of items as well as random tasks that will let teams to earn bonus points, said Communication sophomore Sophie Hoblit, another co-head representative of The DASH.

Levitan said there will be six items in each of four categories: Daring, Adventurous, Sticky and Hilarious. For each category, two items will be rated easy, two medium and two difficult, with each level of difficulty corresponding to a certain amount of points.

To document the completion of an item, each team must take a video and post it on a member’s “My Story” on Snapchat, Ruderman said. The video will be viewed and scored at The DASH headquarters.

Ruderman said he initially thought to use Snapchat as the primary form of communication for The DASH because he was the college counselor of Evan Spiegel, the creator of Snapchat.

“I have lunch with Evan regularly so I know Snapchat, I know how it works,” Ruderman said. “Everybody already uses Snapchat so it’s already on their phone. It’s the perfect platform to run something like this so everything can happen in real time.”

The DASH will take place at Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles, schools also on the quarter system, a week after it debuts at NU, Ruderman said.

Levitan and Hoblit said they hope students who participate have a fun Saturday because people at NU spend a lot of time in the library during the weekend and are stressed. They also said they hope the event will bring people together.

“It’s open to all of Northwestern,” Levitan said. “We’re just trying to get athletes, theater majors, musicians, people in Greek life, every single person to just come together and do it because it would just be a really fun Spring Quarter thing to do.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated how much it costs to participate in the scavenger hunt. It costs $75 per team. The Daily regrets the error.

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