Senior Assassins

Senior Assassins was an unofficial event held exclusively for seniors outside of school that ran from April 11 to May 16. Inspired by the Senior Assassins trend from other schools, senior and co-organizer Student A, who remains anonymous because this was not a school sanctioned activity, was motivated to host an event to bring the senior class together. After announcing signups over the Senior Assassins Instagram, Student A recalls receiving phone calls from numbers they have never seen before from people interested in participating. 

“My phone number was like a currency distributed around the school,” Student A said. “People were really, really, really excited about the game. Even though the prize pool is not as big as other schools, people took this game more seriously. That’s what made it a lot more fun because we don’t have that many opportunities to have fun, [but when] we have the opportunity, we go hard.”

 The game was structured as a round-based tournament, beginning with 41 duos who contributed $5 per person which culminated to a final prize pool of $300. Students tracked their assigned targets on Life360 with the goal of submitting recordings of them eliminating their targets with toy water guns to the Senior Assassins Instagram reels.

During the game, players would be safe from elimination if they wore protective immunity items — a bicycle helmet, pool floaties and swim goggles. The school campus and places of work were safe zones where players could not be eliminated.

Senior Assassins champions Mulyn Kim and Joyce Lui devised various game plans such as keeping immunity items on them as if they were phones, keeping track of their targets’ houses and strategizing for hours outside Lui’s house. Despite their tedious planning, they often made eliminations spontaneously after seeing their target’s vulnerability. This was the case when they saw their target off-campus on Life360, which led to Kim running to his location so quickly that she scraped her knee, elbow and hand.

“I feel like a lot of our kills were a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Lui said. “If it happens it happens. It’s kind of like fate sometimes because it’s just under the right conditions.”

Although Kim and Lui enjoyed Senior Assassins, they saw issues with the moderators participating in the games themselves because they believed they were not transparent with the prize money and could easily twist the rules in their favor. On a social level, Kim and Lui recognize that participating in Senior Assassins took away their free time, causing them to spend less time with other friends not participating in Senior Assassins. Similarly, senior Harsha Suribhatla felt that participating in Senior Assassins forced him to always be on edge to look out for other players.

“You couldn’t do what you usually do — you couldn’t go outside in peace,” Suribhatla said. “You basically always had to check Life360 to see if anyone was coming for you. It’s kind of annoying when I had to always check my location at work or when I was hanging out with my friends just to make sure no one is showing up and trying to shoot me.”

During the finale, the nine finalists participated in a free-for-all week-long purge, where the team who eliminated the most players would win. After getting three kills, the most out of all the teams, Kim and Lui won the game. 

Despite initially believing they had “zero chance” of winning, Kim and Lui say they joined Senior Assassins to show their school spirit. Throughout the games, they bonded with unexpected people over shared Senior Assassins stress, allowing them to connect with their class one last time before graduation. Kim reflects that Senior Assassins was ultimately a fun and rewarding experience, and was glad to have the opportunity to participate in it. 

“My advice is [to] participate in the game,” Kim said. “It was something that Joyce and I never would have done so it was a very spur-of-the-moment thing and out of our comfort zone. If we didn’t [participate in] Senior Assassins, we would just be doing our everyday life stuff. Even if you’re scared to do it, you should still do it.”