"We just noticed by the end that we hadn't cleaned up any vomit, and it was a real surprise. No vomit, not one, within our venue," the Otago University Students Association events manager said.
"Usually, we would have cleaned up three or four a night, and Orientation is a two-week music festival. And the halls of residence also said there was less vomit."
It was not that in previous years the venues' kitchens had been seething with salmonella.
No, the messes of the past had been symptomatic not of a bacterial culture, but of a widespread drinking culture.
So for Ms Reddy (33), the lack of residual vomitus last Orientation was a measure of the success of her efforts to curb alcohol-related harm at student gigs.
She said she decided to try to "change the tone" when appointed events manager in 2007, having been with the OUSA events team since 2005.
"Through my job, I've been invited to alcohol symposiums and DCC hoojimawhatsits to talk about and discuss the alcohol problem we have in Dunedin and New Zealand, within university settings as well as other settings.
"And through that, I looked at [injury prevention scholar] Kyp Kypri's research.
It's got all the numbers and facts about alcohol-related harm, ranging from things like broken sleep all the way through to where you've had an unwanted sexual experience or you've fallen off a wall and banged your head.
"His statistics were quite shocking, and I thought, 'Well, what can we do through our events that will change that?' Because students kind of do, in New Zealand, equate fun with alcohol."
Fun matters in a job such as events planning. Fun is probably 90% of the point.
But the students' welfare must also get a look-in.
Ms Reddy: "At the end of the day, you don't want to be vomiting or you don't want to have broken someone's property on your way home and then have a conviction, or have to be doing community service or feel ashamed."
Her strategies include having volunteers hand out free water bottles, ice-blocks and doughnuts to help fill people's hands and stomachs, and quench their thirst, without alcohol.
"Events are like that: you get really hot and you're jumping around and going, `Yeah yeah yeah, rock on!' and then you think, `Ooh, I'm thirsty'.
So rather than having to buy a beer you can have those things," she said.
"I'm also trying to initiate more mocktails, interesting mocktails, because if you're not a drinker, you can only have so many orange juices.
Kelly from XII Below makes a very good mocktail.
I think I would like to encourage that in following years at Orientation: they're cheaper than an actual drink and they're fun and nice, and you can have a few."
"No means No" crews also lurk at all OUSA-run events these days.
"They hang around in pairs - there's usually about eight of them per event - and they will take people home if they have had too much to drink or they just need a ride home."
Those things had contributed to the apparent reduction in alcohol-related harm, Ms Reddy said.
However, "I don't have it solved. We've made some changes and we've done well, but let's come back with something wow."
In order to come back with something wow, you have first to go somewhere, and on January 4, Ms Reddy is heading to the University of Maryland in the United States, on an extended research trip.
Based in College Park, a city of Timaruvian proportions, she will work alongside public health scholar Prof Kenneth Beck, whose findings about alcohol-related harm have highlighted what he terms students' needs for conviviality.
A few paragraphs in the boil-down of one of his studies were what attracted Ms Reddy.
They read: "One possible solution would be to design creative, exciting and entertaining opportunities for students to engage in so that they meet their needs for conviviality and develop and express their social competencies without the use of alcohol.
"Such activities have to be created and advertised to students as more than just another 'alcohol-free' event.
They have to be sufficiently interesting, novel, and exciting to those types of students who are prone to being adventurous and convivial (i.e., extroverted thrill-seekers)."
Ms Reddy, whose own wacky pastimes include competitive pudding-making and a global treasure-hunt called geocaching, would seem just the planner to produce the kind of novel events recommended.
So she is off to glean ideas from Prof Beck's campus.
"I'm doing coalface research rather than coming back with lots of numbers, going 'Ooh look, yes, harm does happen.'
"I'm coming back with, 'Well, here's seven events that we could do that are really cool; people got into them'.
"I have to assess, obviously, if they're going to work in a Dunedin setting, but hopefully I am going to come back with some events that will really work and change the way that we do the ones here.
"So we'll just change the focus, so there's alcohol there but the focus isn't on the alcohol. It's on the music or the event or the food.
"Or pashing - oh, there's a lot of pashing."
She is acutely aware of the need to come back with something wow rather than something wowser.
"I'm going to be doing a lot of interviewing of students over there, because I want to find out did they even realise they were at a low-alcohol event; did they choose to come to it because it was low-alcohol.
"There will be lots of questioning like that, because I don't want people to go 'Oh, OUSA is a nanna, and Vanessa does knitting.' I work for students, so they are my bosses and I don't want to patronise them at any stage either . . .I do want to get their feedback.
"If students suddenly said, 'This is dumb,' then I'm not going to pursue it."
With the help of a letter of endorsement from Dunedin Mayor Peter Chin, describing her work as something "which can only be for the betterment of our community in general and of our student population in particular", she has garnered grants for the trip from the university, OUSA, and its polytechnic counterpart OPSA.
Generous grants, which show the level of support for her mission, but grants that will nevertheless halve in size when she moves to the US currency zone.
"I've been photocopying recipes of cheap, nutritious meals, because I am going to be on a very tight budget. Chickpeas are gonna be my friend."
As another cost-saver, Ms Reddy will move into shared accommodation in College Park, "which will be interesting in my 34th year, since I haven't flatted for quite a while now.
"I will be going flatting again, hopefully with professionals who are clean and like to do the dishes".
Ms Reddy has already done much of the groundwork for Orientation 2009, and she expects to be back in time to prepare another zero-vomit event for 2010.
"It's host responsibility, really. Reducing alcohol-related harm through event management sounds great, but it's host responsibility.
"Because we do want to care for the students: we don't want to be putting on events where they are coming to harm."