The USC student experience is vast and exciting and can be defined by a thousand different things. One of those is saying “yes” to over 200 challenges in a 24-hour adventure race. If you put those opportunities onto a well-researched list of more than 200 “missions” and throw it into a 24-hour pressure cooker of a scavenger hunt race, you would get a Questival custom-made for USC students. This past weekend, student teams competed for points to win grand prizes of Cotopaxi outdoor gear by accepting missions of different difficulties, like photo-op scavenger hunts, community service for local organizations, and acts of kindness for strangers.
Since 2014, the outdoor equipment company Cotopaxi has been launching Questivals to “empower people to see the world and make it better” by completing local challenges or “missions” to service communities in under 24 hours, according to Jeffrey Steadman, Cotopaxi’s community engagement director in an interview with Outdoor Sportswire.
In 2024, Questival has been brought into University students’ hands through the collaboration of on-campus club leadership (SC Outfitters, Peaks and Professors, SAGE, Spoon, TACO, EMSC, SC Garden Club, USC Climbing, and USC Triathlon) and local non-profit partners (Ronald McDonald House of Los Angeles, EcoDorm, Guayakí, Skratch Labs, Mountain House, Sunbum, Quinn Snacks, Tony’s Chocolonely, and Sunski) to customize missions unique to the colleges’ areas and are achievable for self-led student teams to complete within 24 hours. The extreme coordination and collaboration behind USC’s first Questival are communication student and Cotopaxi campus connector, Gretchen Rudolph, and her student team who designed, planned and ran the event live through an interactive experience app called Goosechase.
When handcrafting activities to best connect USC communities with LA-based opportunities, Rudolph and her team channeled Cotopaxi’s Questival mission statement: “to change the world by having adventures, seeing the world, and working to make it better by doing good.” She aims for Questival to be a longstanding USC tradition, and hopes that future organizers will collaborate with UCLA’s Questival. For now, we can only imagine what a city-wide scavenger hunt would look like between LA’s two biggest universities (and brutal rivals).
What did USC’s first Questival look like in action? “It’s like the reality show ‘Amazing Race,’” said Lily Wang, one of the 10 student organizers, as she monitored the competing teams’ points on the live leaderboard using Goosechase. Competitors used the app to receive their next mission, find surprise gear drop hidden locations, and post their proof-of-completion photos in an Instagram-like feed. The main rule was that the official USC 2024 Questival sticker needed to be included in all completed mission photos to qualify for points.
Professor Martzi Campos, who teaches at USC’s newly formed themed entertainment program, weighed in on how to combine the element of play with real community impact, saying “The fact that [Questival] has a scale of challenges makes it approachable. It’s not so much about creating something challenging enough, but creating options for players to build their own experience and goals for them to reach for.”
One such competitive strategy done by members of the team called “Are we there yet?” was doing as many missions close to the USC campus as possible during the first 12-hour leg of the race. So, they set aside snorkeling and hiking to the Baldwin Hills summit until the second day and instead made gourmet s’mores with USC’s food club Spoon, ran a lap at Allyson Felix Field, and set up an SC Outfitters tent in under three minutes at the Village Lawn. With clever insider knowledge, they also racked up major mission points and snapped a picture of the Hollywood sign from a high vantage point without ever leaving campus. By the start of the second half of the race, they steadily held their place in the top 3 teams–all of whose members would earn free Cotopaxi gear from a selection valued at more than $300.
Other participants had highlights before final results were announced, such as Leslie Moon, from the “eXchange” team who passed out 20 notes of encouragement to strangers at Leavey Library Friday night, and later had people come back to her saying, “You really made my day. I needed that.” Bipshyana Khanal of the “T.E.A.M” team, who used only an e-bike and the Metro for long-distance transportation, held first place at the beginning of the race and found the free Cotopaxi bag hidden on-campus by following clues in an unlabeled picture posted under the Questival’s surprise prize announcement.
When turning the L.A. area into an adventure game map, Jonathan Ogilvy, USC professor of game development fundamentals, sent words of encouragement to future Questival student organizers.
“The sacrifices we make by venturing out of our comfort zones get rewarded in ways no tightly closed system could ever afford,” he said.
Whether through social good, physical challenges or following clues, USC student teams came together alongside campus and local organizations during Questival’s 24 hours to build lasting relationships and experiences through compassion and discovery that can make for a kinder world at large.