Traveling music and ideas festival makes a stop at Penn

A Mark Cuban-backed college tour is bringing music and entrepreneurship to Penn, and excitement is building among the student body.

RECESS, the world’s first college music and ideas festival, is seeking to prepare a new generation of entrepreneurs and also bring some great music acts to campus on Oct. 7 and 9. The event will be hosted by the Wharton Undergrad E-Club, business fraternity Delta Sigma Pi and Dining Philosophers.

RECESS consists of four parts: "Concert," a celebration featuring talented musical artists; "Pitch," a business-pitch competition; "Playground," an interactive networking fair; and "Office Hours," a progressive speaker series. The RECESS group invites all students to join — Playground, Office Hours and Pitch are free but require RSVPs, and Concert is ticketed.

“We’re very excited to bring the RECESS Festival to campus. We can’t wait to see the campus come alive with new ideas,” Wharton Undergrad E-Club chair and Wharton sophomore Dillon Chen said. 

"RECESS is the perfect combination of great ideas and fun events. All the members of Delta Sigma Pi are thrilled to be working with the organization in order to bring the RECESS experience to Penn,” Delta Sigma Pi president and Wharton senior Sebastian Rollen added. 

The event brings together DSP brothers as well as members of Dining Philosophers, an organization that seeks to build a larger community around computer science. 

“For us, RECESS checks all the boxes of what we aim to achieve — helping students find exciting opportunities while building a true sense of community," Dining Philosophers President and Wharton and Engineering senior Karan Hiremath said in a press release. "So working with them really was a no-brainer, and we are super excited to be involved!” 

The Concert part of the event will feature many artists, including Adventure Club, and will be held at The Fillmore.

The RECESS Pitch Competition is a college "Shark Tank"-style competition that gives students the opportunity to take their business ideas and turn them into world changing startups.The winning team from each school advances to a RECESS field trip in Los Angeles, Calif., where they get the opportunity to pitch major investors for possible major funding. 

Office Hours is a speaker series focused around disruption, innovation and inspiration. The lineup includes 1997 Wharton graduate Michael Vaughan, GM and former COO of Venmo.

RECESS has teamed up with some of the world’s leading brands to enhance students’ experience. “By aligning ourselves with the right partners it provides us an avenue to bring once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to college students and do so right in the middle of their campus,” RECESS co-founder Jack Shannon said, also in a press release.

With a festival event of such size and scope, countless hours of work have been put into making it happen. 

“[The planning has] been really good," Chen said. "We started collaborating during the summer, so it’s been a while in the planning. Everyone should be ready for lots of new ideas, and lots new people.”

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