The inside story of the Interlocking UB

By 3:51 p.m. last Friday, the line had snaked up the Putnam Way hill, past Clemens Hall, then looped around on itself to form a double formation that went back down the hill past the Student Union.

All hail the Interlocking UB, the combination spirit-rallying, mass gathering, human performance architecture that has become one of the marquee events of Opening Weekend. By that time, any doubts about the willingness of students to show up on what for many was their first full day on campus and endure the heat and inevitable standing around to take part in UB history had disappeared.

“Organized chaos,” is how Thomas Tiberi, director of student life, describes what has become an Opening Weekend tradition (a large photo of the first and more sparse Interlocking UB project hangs in the Student Union on the ground floor near the ATM machines on the way to Talbert).

Chaos or not, the system works. More than 2,300 UB students — probably predominantly freshmen — waited in line to get their blue or gray UB T-shirt, followed hasty but good-natured directions from UB staff and orientation leaders, and waited patiently — mostly — until pictures and time-lapse photography could record the moments for UB posterity.

“When we started it, we wanted to create a campus tradition and create campus pride,” said Kerry Spicer, associate director of student activities and organizations for Student Life, who wore blue nail polish for the weekend (“I love a theme,” she said.). “The whole goal of Opening Weekend is to connect the students to campus and make sure they’re connecting to each other and UB.

“We do that in a lot of different ways throughout the weekend. But with this particular event, we are literally making them the UB. And showing them they are a part of campus. They get a T-shirt with the UB fight song on it. We just want to instill that pride and that happiness they are here,” Spicer said.

“We know that when students are more connected to campus, they are more successful, they are happier and they have a better experience.”

So the Human Interlocking UB is actually a physical manifestation of this goal of campus spirit and identity. Students put their bodies into it, and because they did, many of them found the connection Spicer and the scores of others from Student Life wanted when they undertook the daunting task of assembling thousands of new students and arranging them within the painted field between Clemens and The Commons. Not to mention getting them to stay put for a good formation until the pictures were done.

“People have said to us, ‘I have met my best friends and my future roommates at the Interlocking UB,” said Spicer, who spent the afternoon on the roof above the 10th floor of Clemens in radio contact with the ground, shaping the all-important formation. “They stand in line up to an hour or more. The photo itself goes really quickly. But they’re with a lot of people, so if there is someone who doesn’t know anyone when they get to campus, well, they have just met 2,000 people.”

Spicer no doubt would appreciate Alex Graziose. A freshman engineering major from Ontario, N.Y., a short drive east of Rochester, Graziose took advantage of the extreme proximity to many of his fellow students — many with tans and shorts — to chat a little.

“There is a sense of adventure, a loving atmosphere. It seems pretty cool,” said Graziose, who soon was introducing himself to others around him as they all stood in the heat waiting for the overhead photo.

“Who was it that said she was from Long Island?” Graziose asked a group of female students all wearing the identical blue T-shirts that formed the interior of the Interlocking UB, a few rows of campus humanity behind the thin gray border. “What part of Long Island are you from?”

“I’m trying to meet new people,” he said. “My old high school is really small, so I figured I would try to expand my circle of friends.”

Before the photo was shot and the crowd dispersed, Graziose had met Oliva Burgner, a freshman from Long Island, and her friends, freshmen Kayleen Wyant of Olean and Lauren Millson of Fredonia.

“I thought it was nice to bring together a lot of freshmen and I wound up meeting a lot of new people,” Burgner said. “I would definitely do it again.”

Also on the field, a few painted hash marks away, was Casey Bertolacci, a freshman biological sciences major from Westchester County who came with her roommate, Jessica Lewis, from Goodyear residence hall on South Campus. She spent some of the hour biding her time talking about hip hop artist Travis Scott while the Interlocking UB master of ceremonies played one of his songs loudly over the speakers. Bertolacci had seen Scott at Radio City, she told the others. And he is scheduled to come to perform at UB this semester. A few places away within easy earshot was a girl who happened to live on Casey’s floor — someone with a distinctive purple room who she had not met before.

“We became friends after that,” Bertolacci said later.

So it goes.

Spicer, Tiberi, Interlocking UB point person Luke Haumesser and the scores of other UB staff would have been proud. It was exactly the connecting they hoped would go on as surely as the thousands of UB students were connecting on the field.

The actual official 2016 Opening Weekend photo was taken shortly before 5. It passed a little anticlimactically, with just a quick crowd announcement that the picture had been taken from the Clemens roof. The helicopter scheduled to take another angle never arrived. Pilot error, to be sure.

Nevertheless, Student Life had staged another ambitious, all-embracing and still personal spectacle with staggering logistics. Moments after the photo, the Human Interlocking UB formation broke quickly as its small pieces took off their shirts and started down to Baird Point for the massive Welcome Back Picnic. Each event was an object lesson of the place where these students would spend the next several years. They were both reminders of the size, the ethic richness, resources and coordination available at UB to make a large university display the personality of a familiar friend.

And most of all, a common identity.