A LEGO contest underdog story for the ages

Creative block? Environmental studies and political science double major Clara Morgan ’26 knows how to persevere when inspiration — or even expertise — may be lacking. The LEGO novice mini-figured out how to break through, brick by brick, during a Skidmore-themed “LEGO Masters”-style competition held in conjunction with the 2024 F. William Harder Lecture in Business Administration featuring Skip Kodak, regional president of the LEGO Group – Americas.

Adaptability infused Clara’s whimsical journey and proved that embracing an unfamiliar challenge (and yes, imperfection) can lead to unexpected results – especially if you’re willing to have fun, take risks, and make mistakes along the way.

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Wednesday

 2:30 p.m.

“If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

I never truly understood the meaning of that quote until I was face to face with a gargantuan abyss of loose LEGO bricks. I gazed into the industrial bins of prismatic squares, and I quickly realized I was in over my head. 

I naively entered the Skidmore Building Challenge with three friends and no LEGO experience. I was presented with a large tote bag and a scale. I was told to pick out 9 pounds of LEGO bricks. I went into LEGO selection with no plan of what to build.

I quickly began to comprehend that I was picking through the leftovers that every other team had rejected after strategically picking out the perfect bricks to execute their visions. 

There were precious few bricks that were any shade of gray, brick, or green (the colors that essentially make up every building on Skidmore’s campus). Instead, we found several golden sarcophagi, various Star Wars characters, and hundreds of bikes and horses.

If we wanted to build an intergalactic scene, a tribute to ancient Egypt, or an ode to various forms of transportation, we were golden. But to build something related to Skidmore (as we were asked to do), we were going to have to dig deep into our creative thought repositories. 

After about five minutes of trying to pick out bricks that could be turned into some semblance of a Skidmore building, I gave up and just started scooping with reckless abandon. 

3:15 p.m. 

Just as I began to feel LEGO red pumping through my veins from the amount of time I spent pawing through these veritable oceans of bricks, I realized that my time to select LEGO bricks was over. I had a full bag of stormtroopers and sarcophagi, the number on the scale blinked “9.00,” and my fate was sealed. 

Dear Reader, it’s impossible for one to fully conceptualize the sheer volume taken up by 9 pounds of LEGO bricks until one is faced with a massive tote bag groaning under the weight of seemingly innumerable bricks. However, the scale of the project didn’t fully hit me until I was handed a 2-foot by 3-foot piece of plywood and told not to make the LEGO project bigger than that. I tried to hide my look of incredulity as I said to myself “Oh, don’t worry … it won’t be.”

4 p.m.

I took one for the team and trekked across campus, bogged down by a massive slab of plywood and the weight of having to figure out what to do with approximately 2,000 LEGOs. 

11 p.m.
I went to bed to rest up for the long day of LEGO-ing ahead. When I shut my eyes, I saw LEGO bricks in my dreams.  

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Thursday (Contest day!)

10 a.m.
With an unexpected free morning spread before us following a winter storm, our team naturally decided to procrastinate the planning and building of our LEGO masterpiece. The universe gave us a gift of extra time, and we did not utilize it. There was nary a LEGO-related utterance in our team’s group chat, despite the impending deadline. 

5 p.m.
I left my evening class, took a deep breath to brace myself for the night ahead and began my intrepid journey back to my dorm to retrieve the LEGOs and take them to our building location. Despite having no plans, no vision, our mixed bag of LEGOs, and no experience, we weren’t discouraged. We ordered pizza to fuel for the herculean task in front of us, found an empty classroom to set up camp in, and put on some upbeat music. Against all odds, we were going to walk out of that room with a Skidmore-themed LEGO creation. 

7 p.m.
We finally finished meticulously sorting through thousands of LEGOs. We breathed a collective sigh of relief, and then realized that the sorting was the easy part. The time to decide what to build was nigh. At one point, a professor stopped by, and as Taylor Swift blared from my speaker in the background, he joked about our less than optimal progress. He was right, of course. We decided to paint a miniature version of him and include it in our LEGO diorama. 

7:30 p.m.
We attempted to make the facade of Scribner Library. We tried to use our myriad window pieces to make the Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences and its adjacent greenhouse. We quickly realized we had no idea what we were doing, and we gave up on the pipe dream of building anything more complicated than a rectangle. 

Thus, we decided to make the glorified rectangle that is officially called Jonsson Tower and to make it rainbow, due to our utter lack of JoTo-colored bricks. Thus, Rainbow LEGO JoTo was born. 

8:30 p.m.
We persevered. Nothing could stop our team. Armed with iPhone flashlights and dogged determination to get to bed at a reasonable hour, we soldiered on. 

9 p.m.
Layer by layer, brick by brick, rainbow LEGO JoTo was beginning to take shape. Despite the trials and tribulations of attempting to fit the layers together and realizing they were all different sizes, we managed to get a building that somewhat resembled JoTo. 

10 p.m.
We transported our LEGO building back to our dorm for the night. However, it was looking a bit dismal. Rainbow JoTo was adrift amidst a sea of bare plywood, so we decided to paint some grass and the paths of Case Green in order to spruce up our production value a bit. 

10:30 p.m.
Some of our hallmates in Wilmarth Hall happened to walk by the common room where we were painting the plywood for our display. They took us to their dorm to show us their LEGO creation. Our jaws dropped. It was incredibly intricate. They went on to soundly beat us in the contest, as they absolutely should have. No judge in their right mind would ever doubt their obvious LEGO superiority. 

11 p.m.
Rainbow LEGO JoTo was finally done. I cleaned the paintbrushes in my bathroom sink, and started on the homework I had put off in order to build my LEGO creation. 

1 a.m.
Bedtime, finally. 

Friday

11:45 a.m.
We transported Rainbow Lego JoTo and our painted plywood display to Case Center. We did some last minute “landscaping” (throwing any plant LEGOs we could find onto the painted grass) and stepped back to admire our deeply mediocre creation. 

3:29 p.m.
We received a shocking email: Our cobbled together creation had somehow gotten third place in the competition and would be displayed at the Harder Lecture with the regional CEO of LEGO. I quickly revised the original title of my essay, “Getting dead last in a LEGO competition: An epic saga.” 

We celebrated our unexceptional placement as though we had just won a gold medal in the Olympics. We didn’t win any prizes, but we had lots of fun playing with LEGOs and listening to great music.
 
When all is said and done, maybe the true prize was the creative thought that mattered along the way.