The Bateman Team, West Texas A&M University’s Recreational Sports and Outdoors and the Admissions Office are challenging Buffs to embrace cultures, climb to new heights and show school spirit.

The Bateman Team is a nationally competitive public relations team of students applying their classroom skills to represent an actual client; this year, their client is Culturs, The Global Multicultural Magazine. As part of their campaign, they issued the Buffs Community Challenge on Instagram.

“We created the challenge because Culturs really wants to engage and bring people from different cultures all together on college campuses and really give them a safe space to express their culture and belong with each other,” Jenna Lopez, a junior on the design team for Bateman, said. “We thought a challenge to bring students out of their comfort zone would be a good way for them to engage with one another and kind of learn more about other cultures on campus.”

The Buffs Community Challenge consists of four mini-challenges, the details of which can be found on their Instagram @buffscommunity. Each challenge will remain open to participants until March 4. For each completed mini-challenge, the participant will have their name entered to win a prize at the end of the campaign.

“Culturs has an ambassador program in which students can sign up for this program, and they can put on events for Culturs in future years and they may even have the opportunity to write content for Culturs,” Jaclyn Ferrel, a sophomore on the communications team for Bateman, said. “So, that’s a big thing for any comm majors. Any students that would be interested can just reach out to us.”

WT’s Recreational Sports and Outdoors issued its sixth Mile High Challenge for students and community members to try at the Virgil Henson Activities Center (VHAC) climbing tower. Participation is free for students, and others with a VHAC membership make a one-time payment of $10.

“The goal is to climb a mile up our tower, which is a total of 132 climbs from bottom to top throughout the spring semester, so they have about 12 to 14 weeks to get that done,” Brianna Jarratt, assistant director for recreational sports and outdoors, said. “And it’s really impressive how students can dig deep and complete that challenge or even just put effort towards it, whether they succeed in it or not.”

Mile High finishers receive a t-shirt and recognition at the climbing tower. The Mile High Challenge includes featured mini-challenge events for participants to make progress in different ways. Completing mini-challenges earns participants tickets to use in a prize raffle at the Mile High Party on May 2. Jarratt said that so far, students are more than rising to the occasion.

“We had one particular student who completed the mile within the first four days,” Jarratt said. “There was a day where he climbed over 60 climbs in a day and that really wears out the body; so impressive. We also have students that sometimes challenge themselves to climb more than the mile; like last year, we had an outstanding – actually, I think we [gave] them the overachiever award – an individual climb to three miles instead of a single mile throughout the whole semester. Really impressive.”

Participants don’t have to aim for the overachiever award to participate. According to Jarratt, climbing is for everyone.

“If you have a body and you can get it on the wall, then you have a climbing body, so we say,” Jarratt said. “Whether you have experience or not, just coming out here and trying something new really is our goal. We want to challenge folks where they’re at. Whether it’s the challenge of coming here and trying it for the first time – because that can be intimidating – or challenging themselves to commit to more. We want to give the opportunity to students, and more importantly, support them in that.”

The Admissions Office’s Instagram is hosting a Pop-Up Bucky Contest. Recently admitted students receive a pop-up Bucky with their acceptance letter and can use it to participate in the photo challenge and possibly win prizes, which include t-shirts, car decals and backpacks. More details are available on Instagram.