Months before the stands are filled with people and the first Dodger Dog is eaten, Cal Poly University students are hard at work.
“We’ve been working on this float, at least the concept of it, since February,” said 5th-year Cal Poly engineering student Brooke Handschin.
Handschin says around 250 students from Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo worked together to create this year’s float for the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.
“So everything that’s on the float, the mechanisms to the actual elements to everything is just done by all students,” Handschin explained.
“Nessie’s Lakeside Laughs” is the team’s 76th float for the Rose Parade, standing 22 feet tall and 55 feet long.
“It’s large. Nessie is big! I believe at the end, the float will weigh around 35 to 40 tons,” said 4th-year student and float team president Collin Marfia.
Covering the massive float are more than 37,000 flowers and other organic materials.
“A lot of weird, strange materials this year — coconut husk, corn silk we’re using as fur on animals as well as black moss, pampas grass on one of our dogs,” Marfia explained.
While building the float is fun, Marfia says the most rewarding part is working together as a team.
“Their motto is to learn by doing, and that’s what this program is the epitome of,” Marfia said.
Since 1949, the school has won 63 awards. This year, the float took home the Leishman Public Spirit Award for outstanding floral presentation from a non-commercial entry.
But the students say the real joy doesn’t come from awards.
“The thing that keeps me coming back is the community, is the people that I’ve met,” Marfia said. “I mean, to be here for such long hours throughout an entire year and working on this with the same group of people for a long time, you grow to love and care for these people.”