The annual Watermelon Drop is UC San Diego’s oldest tradition. The event took place Friday, before finals week when this year’s “Watermelon Queen” Justine Hopkins, a second-year theatre major, raced up seven stories of Urey Hall to drop the sacrificial fruit into history. The goal is to break the 1974 splat record of 167 feet, 4 inches. However, this year’s farthest splat missed the mark, coming in at 67 feet, 11 inches. This campus ritual started in 1965 as a physics experiment to determine the terminal velocity of a watermelon when it hits the ground at more than 100 miles per hour.
The annual festival, which has been a campus tradition for more than three decades, once again reached capacity this year, with 23,000 students, alumni, faculty, staff and guests attending.