For most of my time at Caltech, Ditch Day was something I experienced as a participant. I would wake up, find the stack of sign-ups on the doors, and spend the day running around campus solving puzzles and completing challenges with my friends.
This year, as a senior, I got to help plan our house’s Ditch Day stack, which was GTA (Grand Theft Auto) themed. Instead of trying to solve puzzles, I spent weeks helping create them.
One of the events I worked on was a prison-themed escape room. Looking back, one of the coolest parts of the experience was seeing how different it is to design an escape room compared to completing one.
When you are solving an escape room, you only see the clues in front of you. When you are designing one, you have to think about every way someone might interpret a clue.
Would players understand what we intended? Would they notice the important details? Was a puzzle too easy, or too hard?
We designed multiple rooms that required communication between teammates. Some players were “prisoners” solving physical puzzles, while others acted as “helpers” gathering information from a separate room and communicating through walkie-talkies.
One of my favorite parts of the process was working alongside the seniors in Page House.
Some seniors worked on designing games, others built props, painted decorations, organized logistics, or tested puzzles. It was cool seeing how everyone’s individual contributions came together into one cohesive theme.
One of the biggest projects was painting a themed door for the event. Seeing the finished artwork after weeks of planning made everything feel real.
There were moments when teams solved clues much faster than anticipated, and moments when they found completely different approaches than the ones we envisioned while designing the room.
Seeing the stack from the planner’s perspective gave me a new appreciation for how much effort goes into Ditch Day every year.
After weeks of planning, building, testing, and running events, the day concluded with a trip to the beach.
As a freshman, Ditch Day felt like a mysterious Caltech tradition. As a senior, I got to experience the other side of it—helping create something that hundreds of students would enjoy.
