Claremont McKenna College seniors have done something that hasn’t been done since 1998: they brought the ceramic pig trophy back to CMC. Awarded annually, the smiling swine--now resting comfortably on its haunches in the Bauer Center lobby display case--symbolizes a nine-year-old rivalry between the senior classes of CMC, Pitzer, Scripps, and Pomona colleges. The trophy is awarded to whichever senior class earns the highest participation rate for its college’s Senior Gift Fund.

The trophy has been holing up at Scripps since 1999, but CMC seniors brought it back to greener pastures when they rallied 95 percent of their classmates into making Senior Fund gifts during a five-week period that ended May 1, 2002. While this victory marks the College’s second-highest participation rate since the contest’s implementation in 1993 (the standing CMC record is 97 percent) this year’s total gifts of nearly $7,000 is the College’s biggest-ever senior jackpot.

A Parents Club Challenge helped fatten this year’s piggy by matching every donation--regardless of size--by $20.

The hammy homecoming was a sweet surprise, and there’s already hope that CMCers can piggyback on this year’s success. “It’s certainly a nice security blanket for us,” said CMC’s former assistant director of annual giving, Matt Callan, who supervised this year’s program. And, says CMC director of Annual Giving, Ana Collisson, “what this shows is that 95 percent of the senior class felt they wanted to give back to their alma mater. It’s really a tangible way of measuring alumni satisfaction.”

Donations to the senior gift fund are crucial to the overall participation numbers, Collisson said. “It represents three percentage points in our alumni participation, which is one the factors considered in the annual rankings of colleges and universities.”

Each senior who contributed this year received a CMC Alumni Association directory, and those who submitted donations before the deadline got to put a word on the senior class mug. (The printed mugs were distributed at Commencement rehearsal.)

The senior gift fund campaigns traditionally rely on face-to-face solicitations between committee members and their peers. Callan said this year’s success speaks not only to the organization of committee members, but to “lots and lots of calling, and lots and lots of effort." Particularly this year, seniors made a point of reaching out to off-campus students, and other seniors considered “not as active as other students,” Callan said. “One committee member found a common thread among a core group of students, and they all designated their gifts for something really important: minority scholarship funds.”

This year’s committee members included co-chairs A.J. Kemp, Joe Cericola, Selena Carsiotis, Ashley Fluhrer, and Akshata Murty, and committee members Gaurav Sharma, Preeti Shah, Jonathan Royas, Anthony Ramirez, Grace Kim, Melissa Crowley, and Ben Baumer.

And this little piggy went . . . home. Home to CMC, that is, when the College's Class of 2002 won it back from Scripps by earning the highest participation rate for the Senior Class Fund.