Senior Fifth Prevention Campaign

Various offices within Campus Life have developed a multi-pronged intervention for “Senior Fifth,” which includes a prevention poster campaign aimed at upperclassmen. Students are seeing posters on digital screens, printed posters, and tent-boards around campus in areas strategically chosen to be seen by upperclass students.

Peter Rives (’98), Assistant Director of Wellbeing – Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention, explains Senior Fifth:

Senior Fifth is a very dangerous activity in which some upperclass students have participated in the past. It involves students attempting to drink an entire 750ml bottle (fifth) of liquor the day of the last home football game before kickoff (this year 11/19/16 v. Clemson). This unfortunate activity is not unique to Wake Forest. This prevention campaign seeks to foster a campus culture that questions assumptions that this activity is safe or universally accepted and offers those who wish to decline participation support and language with which to resist peer pressure. The posters specifically invoke the risk associated with alcohol poisoning, the nostalgia that upperclassmen students feel about their time spent at Wake Forest University, the conflict between high-risk drinking and achievement, and research on Self Perception of Adulthood (SPOA). This poster campaign is just one piece of a multi-faceted prevention program aimed at reducing high-risk drinking among Wake Forest University students. 

The primary goal with this campaign is to stimulate discussion about Senior Fifth, to raise questions about the compatibility of Senior Fifth with safety, maturity and academic success, and to give those feeling pressure to participate language with which to push back.

Here are some of the posters that are being used in this campaign.