Author: Eric Wu, W’04
Following the tradition of hosting 1st September events throughout the country, The Penn Club of Chicago descended upon the Lakeview neighborhood to popular bar Mad River for a night of intellectual challenge, beers, and wings. Coincidentally, Mad River also happens to be the only known official Philadelphia Eagle bar in the city, a rare occurrence in Chicago Bear country.
With great marketing support from Laura Foltman, from the Alumni Relations Office, and our club president Michal Clements, we were able to make this the largest attended Quizzo event for the Chicago club, possibly turning this for one night into Smokey Joes Midwest
36 alumni and 6 guests split into 5-6 separate mixed teams. In all Penn brought 40+ people to a bar on top of their normal crowd. We had a mix of everyone from recent undergraduate grads to recently minted Wharton MBAs. Among those in attendance were incoming Penn Club of Chicago president, Peter Exley (GAR 1990), Sarah Doherty (SEAS’10 and VP of Young Alumni and yPenn chair), as well as founder/proprietor of new Chicago based craft brewery Moody Tongue Brewing, Jeremy Cohn (W’09).
Mad River is known for its eclectic and wide ranging mix of topics from general pop culture questions to world history, and is a very popular destination among the Chicago trivia scene. Among the answers asked which team Penn answered were correctly naming the famous video game series Castlevania, or identifying the football team of Hall of Fame defensive end Michael Strahan, and identifying the Jim Carrey movie where this written quote appeared from (Liar Liar), or naming the band who sang this song (Semisonic). Going into the final question, 3 of the Penn teams were in the top 5.
Sarah provided an impromptu raffle of the Penn swag graciously provided by the alumni office. She also boldly predicted in an email earlier that week that Penn would come out on top of trivia. With all the recent Penn accolades including Best College Nationwide , Number 1 Party School , it only seemed logical that that Quaker domination continued. Her premonition proved true. Team Penn brought that swagger into the final question with the top Penn team going all-in the final question. Game set match. Victory! The bar manager came over to let us know that we had unseated a team that had won 4 of the last 5 trivia nights. Could this be the beginning of a new dynasty?
Frankly Penn 