Utah State’s First Ever Thank-A-Thon
Utah State’s first ever Thank-A-Thon took place during Wednesday’s Common Hour. The service project was put together by the Service Center in order to thank USU’s professors and staff members for their hard work.
Tables with free cards were set up from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. for students walking in and around the Taggart Student Center to express their thanks to specific faculty members.
“It all stemmed from the fact that we wanted to bring a service project to campus,” said Leah Calder, the service vice president. “We go out into the community a lot with the service center but we wanted to have a service opportunity for students on campus, so that’s where the whole common hour project came from.”
The Service Center is responsible for two service projects a semester to be held during Common Hour. The Thank-A-Thon was chosen because it was cheap and easy, but also personable for the students who participated.
“We thought it would be awesome to thank all the people that make our school what it is, because we love it here at Utah State so why not give back a little?” Calder said. “It’s much more personable for the students to write to the professors and staff because of their connection with them than it is to say write letters to military personnel or to children that are receiving cancer treatment.”
Faculty members participated in the event by distributing the thank you cards throughout the TSC to students. Overall they said that the responses they received from students was positive.
“We sent out a lot of the directors of the different programs a lot of them grabbed a handful and went down to the Hub to hand them out,” said Nelda Ault, the Service Center advisor. “They reported back that their reception was students were happy to write a thank you card. Some would say they didn’t have anyone to thank yet, but hey, we’ll get them later when they do.”
Calder and the Service Center stated that the first event was a success, that they brought in many more cards than they had planned to.
“We were only expecting one to two hundred cards so to get three hundred and fifty was amazing,” Ault said. “It is going to take us a while to process that, but that’s not even a drop in the bucket as far as how many people work at the university, which is about 9,000.”
The thank you cards written Wednesday will be distributed to faculty members after the next event in November along with the cards written during that event.
“We have another one in November but in between the events it will be more of a pass it around event to different organizations on campus and have their people sign thank you cards,” Calder said. “We will have the events but also just pass cards out to different departments, have them fill them out and bring them back to the Service Center.”
The Thank-A-Thon service project will continue to occur throughout the semester and possibly the school year during Common Hour.
“This was the first time we’d done this event or even a service project during Common Hour, so it was definitely an experiment for us,” Ault said. “The service center is very interested in doing service in different and diverse ways because a lot of people think they don’t have time, but I think we showed that students can do it by just taking two minutes to write a card.”