A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 27

This is the 11th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Because the best way to come up with a great story idea is to come up with a lot of ideas. And the best way to come up with a lot of ideas is to be proactive in sourcing story ideas.

Today’s story: Inside the sex-crazed final weeks at America’s elite colleges.

John Avendano, Columbia College’s 2018 senior class president, received only one piece of advice from his predecessor.

“She said, ‘Your best friends are going to ask who put them down for senior scramble, and you can’t tell them,’ ” Avendano, now 23 and applying to medical school, tells The Post. “It was probably the hardest thing I had to deal with in my tenure.”

In addition to his official student council role, Avendano ran the Senior Underground — a technically unaffiliated group that plans senior bar crawls, final banquets and the senior scramble, an annual, classwide matchmaking dating service that has students rank their top 10 college crushes in the hopes of sealing the deal before graduation.

The senior scramble — also a blanket term for end-of-senior-year hookups — is a tradition as well known as beer pong at many elite schools. In the final days of college, students devise a bucket list of classmates with whom they want to get cozy and submit it to a governing body, such as a student-designed website or computer program.

As these are top students we’re talking about, they don’t merely submit their lists and move on, either. Avendano says his classmates tackled last-chance hookups with the same intensity they brought to their final exams.

“I got so many messages from people essentially insisting that there must have been a mistake or a bug in the code because they thought someone definitely put them down,” says Avendano of his stressful time as the unofficial minister of collegiate sex.

“I would see that there were a lot of matches that people thought was going to happen, and they did not. Some might say it’s juicy information.”

My initial instinct was to go the straight-ahead Superbad / Booksmart approach: Follow the exploits of a couple of best friends on a final fling before graduation. Then I zeroed in on this from the article: “I would see that there were a lot of matches that people thought was going to happen, and they did not. Some might say it’s juicy information.”

That’s a quote from the person who anonymously runs the program which determines who gets on whose Senior Scramble list. What if nerdy math girl Wendy along with her best friend Brenna are in charge of this year’s list? What’s to keep them from altering the data. For instance, they could put together students they (Wendy and Brenna) figure will hate each other. They could arrange for heterosexual students to get listed with gay students. Mix ethnic groups. And the piece de resistance, they could put their secret crushes on their lists.

A wild night of twists, turns, complications, surprises, hard-partying, romance, and even some folks getting horizontal before the sun comes up.

Title: Scramble.

There you go, my 27th story idea of the month. What would YOU do with it?

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26

Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.