On Wednesday, March 5, freshman Luke Bennetsen was crowned the winner of the 2025 “Schultze Challenge.”
Established in 2021 by a Schultze-Eldersveld (SE) social events team, the Schultze Challenge is a month-long, dorm-wide event where the residents of SE compete to see who can complete the highest number of outlandish tasks.
According to Eldersveld resident Haleigh Honeck, the event’s runner-up, “some of the craziest of these tasks included getting the bottom of my foot tattooed. The other one that I really had fun with was sleeping in the basement and getting a bunch of people to do that with me.”
The event comes with a $20 prize for the first-place winner, but many of the participants agreed that it was not the money that they were playing for. Rather, they were playing to build community and contribute to the legacy of SE.
To Bennetsen, the award he received meant much more than the small cash prize. “$20 and eternal fame and glory. I don’t know why I was still motivated. I just thought it would be fun.”
“Also, if you win, you get to run it the next year,” Bennetsen said.
This focus on dorm community fits with the intent of the organizers. According to SE president Emily Fett, “the RHET team was really split on whether or not we would do prize money or not” because they wanted the event to be about dorm culture.
“I think that my favorite aspect is that it’s just a good excuse to do things you would never usually do,” said Fett.
“Last year, my friends and I slept in the hallway on a school night, and we just brought all of our mattresses into the hallway. And then a couple nights after, I had my giant 10-person tent from home, and we set it up by the solarium and had a sleepover there,” Fett said.
Although many of the challenges are more fun and lighthearted, there were also a few that made the participants consider the world around them on a deeper level. Honeck recalls writing a letter thanking one of the dining hall workers for being so positive. “Every time I walk in the dining hall, she greets me with an even bigger smile,” said Honeck.
“It was [only] a small amount of points, but it made, I think, a really big impact,” said Honeck. “I would love to see more of that in the challenges; these small little acts of kindnesses that end up making bigger impacts down the road.”
However, in addition to being about community building, the challenge is still about winning. To gain this year’s victory, Bennetsen planned out from the start which challenges were the most cost-effective and realistic. From this narrowed-down selection, he made his own list.
To avoid scaring his competition into being motivated to get more points, Bennetsen said he waited till the end to submit the points for completed challenges.
In the four years that the challenge has existed, there have been some changes. Originally, only the residents of Schultze were allowed to participate, but it is now open to Eldersveld as well.
The challenges themselves have also evolved as the event has received more oversight from the university. Sophomore Schultze resident Ben Dyke, who oversaw this year’s challenge, said that creating the challenge list was one of the more complicated parts of organizing the events. “Most of the commitment is in the preparation leading up to the challenges and making sure everything gets approved,” said Dyke. “Everything has to get approved every year for the challenges.”
Some participants expressed mixed feelings about the increased regulation.
“It’s a little less fun and spontaneous when the dean of students has to go through and take out anything that is deemed inappropriate,” Fett said.
As far as for the future of the Schultze Challenge, Fett hopes that it can continue to have strong roots within the community. Fett emphasized that dorm community changes year-to-year and that traditions are only one down year from falling out of existence. Fett hopes this won’t be the case with the Schultze Challenge. “I hope that it continues to be a thing and that it gains momentum,” Fett said.
