“Embrace the awkward!” Signs around the hallways warned of the upcoming event: Mix It Up at Lunch day, a Teaching Tolerance national campaign that encourages students to sit with new people. The St. Paul Academy and Summit School Senior Class Leadership Council coordinated the Oct. 29 Mix it Up day in an effort to bring students from different social groups together.

SCLC member Frank Nahurski describes the reason Mix It Up day was created in the first place: “Across the country, across all schools, lunchrooms cause students anxiety. You’ve probably felt this yourself if you’ve gotten to lunch early and had to sit by yourself for a bit until people arrived. It doesn’t feel good,” Nahurski said.

During Mix It Up day, students entered the lunchroom and were randomly assigned to sit with people they may have never had an exchange with. Nahurski and the rest of SCLC have hopes for the conversations started during the day. “It isn’t designed to be game changing, but it might stimulate one to change their way of thinking…if only for 10 minutes,” Nahurski said.

Nahurski’s knows the reality of the situation: “for the vast majority of Mix It Uppers, this lunch day will serve only to annoy them and make them resent the class leadership councils,” Nahurski said.

However, he still has a very positive outlook on the event. “If this lunch blossoms even one relationship it will have been a success. We have nothing to lose from Mix It Up day, and everything to gain,” Nahurski said.

Freshman Jackson Jewett looks back on Mix It Up day fondly. “Right away I felt very welcomed and we all had a good discussion on some of the questions that were on the table,” Jewett said.

His expectations of this new event were surpassed when he sat with three sophomore girls. “I was very surprised how well it went because we really didn’t know one another and we still managed to have a very good conversation without it stopping,” Jewett said.

“I hope that students would learn to be able to sit down with a group of people and have some filler conversation that perhaps leads people to believe they have more in common than they thought. Mix It Up day can be considered practice for maybe a similar situation they will most certainly face at some point down the line,” Nahurski said.

On the whole, students agree that Mix It Up day should remain an SPA tradition: “During this lunch I met multiple new people and it helped a lot with not everyone sitting with the same exact people every day,” Jewett said.