College students from around Wisconsin traveled to Oshkosh last weekend to participate in the Oshkosh Pub Crawl celebration. The bi-annual event has been happening for years and is a gathering for students to drink and socialize. 

Many students who attended said they thought pub crawl was a great way to bring people from the community together. 

“It’s like the one event of the year that brings people from other colleges back to Oshkosh to visit their friends,” said UW Oshkosh senior Andrew Kaminski. 

Another student agreed that pub crawl was a nice way to meet new people. 

“Honestly, go talk to anyone because you’re all just vibing at this point,” said UW-Milwaukee sophomore Lilly Mayer.

While attendees agreed on the social benefits of pub crawl, they had mixed opinions on the effect of police presence around the event. 

University of Minnesota senior Malia Pattison said, “There’s a difference between like patrolling everything, versus like coming and trying to be vindictive and like ruin it all.”

An anonymous UW Oshkosh senior agreed, “I don’t think it helps that much,” the student said. “I think it just gives people public intoxicants and underages. I don’t think it stops bad things from happening. I think fights and other stupid stuff will happen no matter what.” 

Fox Valley Technical College student Noah Dixon had different views. He felt the police helped with the pub crawl atmosphere.

“It gets pretty loud between college kids and there’s always butting heads and that’s why the police need to step in and other than that, you know they’re just doing their jobs,” Dixon said.

Kaminski felt similarly to Dixon and said that they were doing their jobs well to stop any incidents that might arise. 

Luckily the students being interviewed were not involved in any incidents. Their advice to students who wanted to attend pub crawl: be safe, smart and have fun.  

“As long as you’re not like doing anything stupid like having an open intoxicant on the sidewalk, you guys will be perfectly fine,” Dixon said. “And if the police show up, move to the back of the party, you’ll be perfectly fine.”