Our Process

Excitement

We want to generate excitement for the festival by hearing and listening to what the student body has to say. We’ve accomplished this by creating a pre-survey for the festival, as well as holding three town halls for student feedback and participation.

Celebration

We want to bring back a shared sense of pride in the festival. We plan to achieve this by curating a lineup with larger, more exciting acts by consolidating budget and shifting to one stage. We’re also bringing in more activities, such as a giant water slide, a silent disco, and more interactive art.

Campus Unity

We want to provide students with a safe space to make memories. We will emphasize peer-to-peer health & safety messaging in order to prioritize the festival’s continuity and sustainability for the future.

ASCE receives an allocation of $730,000 for the Sun God Festival from Associated Students every year. This year, we were also able to acquire an extra $50,000 in funding from the student government. Traditionally, we split the budget between Safety, Production, and Entertainment with the respective percentages (rough): 41%, 39%, 20%. In order to leverage well with agents when negotiating, we are unable to reveal the exact numbers involved in our budget to the public.

Have suggestions for improvements?

We will be releasing a post Sun God Festival 2019 survey. Keep on the look out!

Want to get a taste of event planning?

Volunteer and be part of the festival in a special way: You can join our Sun God Festival committees every Monday from 4:30 to 5:30PM on the 4th floor of Price Center, or you can volunteer on the day of the festival through filling out our volunteer app.

Due to the rocky relationship the Sun God Festival has had with the campus and city of La Jolla, security has been heightened in order to ensure that students can celebrate this shared tradition safely. Student safety is the institution’s priority. Security helps keep the festival an ongoing tradition at UC San Diego.

Students who are residents in Marshall College, Eleanor Roosevelt College, and the Village must wear wristbands in the week leading up to the festival. Wristbands will be distributed through the RAs. Wristbands act to mitigate large gatherings or disruptions in the residential communities on campus, assisting the residential life staff in maintaining safe living spaces for students in the week of the Sun God Festival.

Special housing policies will be implemented to mitigate the prospect of multiple large gatherings or disruptions in the residential communities and to assist staff in efficiently handling any situations in the living areas over the weekend of the Sun God Festival. This year, non-UCSD-affiliated guests will not be allowed to stay in the residential areas during the weekend of the Sun God Festival (April 25 – 28).

Additionally, only residents of their respective residential areas are allowed to be present in living spaces of those areas during specified time periods during the weekend of the Sun God Festival. Please refer to your RA or Residential Life Office for more information on these policy changes and these specified time periods.

When booking artists, we look at a number of factors: general name recognizability, expense, and popularity within the student body on campus (factors in genre and diversity). The context and background of the artist is extremely important to us as well. Every year, we ask students for artist suggestions via our Fall Quarter Entertainment survey. You may also participate and suggest artists in our Sun God Festival pre-survey.

Due to budget and festival changes to prioritize talent buying, ASCE has decided to discontinue our Battle of the Bands tradition for the 2019 Sun God Festival. Student artists will still have opportunities to showcase their work at the festival through other means via listening stations.