Freshers’ Week allowed the University Observer to tease their latest venture in search for funds: joining the horse racing world.
Freshers Week was arguably a success. Yet this is hardly surprising, and all it did was prove that UCD students find oddly appealing the idea of spending an entire week in a place where personal boundaries are a distant memory - and yours truly has already covered the success of the Tent and how students have come together to make it a permanent feature of Belfield campus. Clubs and societies had a field day - actually, five - in the Tent, with incoming and returning students expressing their interest in joining the party. Or at least they pretended to be interested in an Oscar-worthy audition for DramSoc.
In a rather surprising turn of events, the University Observer also had a successful Freshers’ Week. It might have been thanks to Editor Tessa Ndjonkou’s unprompted pop culture references or Deputy Ilaria Riccio’s ability to run her mouth for six straight hours, but it is undeniable that a large crowd of UCD students stopped by the stand the Observer shared with the Student’s Union - although a Harpy source points out that the free condoms were the main attraction of the stand, and students only stopped longer because they felt bad about ghosting the Observer’s staff in real life.
Editor and Deputy looked at each other bewildered when they saw that they had surpassed 200 sign-ups as the week came to a close. Their surprise was primarily due to the disparity between the number of people who expressed their interest in the Observer and the resources the paper disposes of. As already reported by the Harpy, the paper opened an OnlyFans account in a - rather desperate - attempt to increase the figures of the Observer’s bank account. Unfortunately, the upper-editorial team slowly realised that their carefully curated content was taking longer than expected to inflate the Observer’s finances. Luckily, the paper is run by two people who eat delusion for breakfast, and Editor and Deputy orchestrated an articulated plan to subtly share their latest venture in the quest for funds with the UCD student population.
Counting on the voluntary participation of the Tent’s staff, the Observer was strategically placed right next to the Horse Racing Society, without a clear way to tell the stands apart; in this way, students who were interested in the HRS approached the Observer’s stand instead, and were subjected to an unrequested explanation of how a newspaper works. The Observer’s team treated the situation as a mere joke, filling their social media with even more memes than usual - and that’s saying a lot. Unbeknownst to them, students were participating in an elaborate marketing strategy to announce that the Observer is joining the Horse Racing industry in yet another desperate attempt to find sponsors.
As Editor and Deputy spend their free time learning how a horse race works, the Harpy can exclusively reveal that the Curragh Racecourse is a likely contender to host the Observer’s 30th Birthday Party in 2024.