If you do a search for the #ViterbiImpact hashtag on twitter (or head over to our twitter page on this very site!) you can get regular updates on the philanthropic/volunteer work my fellow Viterbi Student Ambassadors do in their free time or with our various clubs. We might be busy with engineering, but we’re never too busy to help out the local community or the world at large! I just wanted to take a blog post to highlight some of the things I’ve personally done in just the last few weeks.
Pass the Can for Troy Camp
Troy Camp is USC’s official philanthropy, and it’s awesome! Basically USC students go to local schools and run activities on everything from science to improv all year, and then during the summer they do a camp. I’m not in Troy Camp, but tons of my friends are, so each year I volunteer for Pass the Can, which is a fundraiser they do at the Homecoming football game. During halftime, they play a video about TC and then hundreds of volunteers like myself pass milk jugs (I assume they must have used cans at some point) up and down the rows to collect donations. Apparently this year they raised over $23,000 in just 20 minutes! It’s a really cool tradition that USC fully supports and I encourage all of you to look into Troy Camp more!
Tailgate Waste Diversion with the USC Office of Sustainability
The USC Office of Sustainability put together a new program this year where they ask Student Orgs to volunteer to help educate tailgaters on proper waste diversion and sorting.
Some enthusiastic members of the Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering ready to clean campus at 8AM on gameday!
We teach people about what can be recycled and what can be composted, and of course we do also help pick up and sort some of the waste. It’s all part of USC’s concerted efforts to go green, and the Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering was happy to help. We worked 5 hours before the game and then I headed right over to help out with Pass the Can
It was a busy day!
Canstruction – Marshall and Viterbi’s Food Drive
This year the business and engineering schools teamed up for our first annual canstruction competition! Basically it’s like a regular food drive, but at the end, you build something out of the cans (engineering!). This year we built a USC logo to kick things off!
Pretty impressive for our first year! Google canstruction for an idea of what we’re working towards
Once again, the Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering volunteered, raising over 277 cans of the 1000+ donated to the event. This was just one of many food drives the USC community does (most res halls do their own drives), but this was definitely my favorite! Check out this video of the canstruction process!
Walking across campus with suitcases full of canned goods was interesting. Definitely the heaviest suitcases I’ve ever had. We broke the wheels right off and then just had to drag them… but it was all for a good cause!
ASBME @ the LA Food Bank
If you couldn’t already tell, ASBME really likes to do philanthropic work in addition to all our other stuff! It’s part of why we’re awesome :D. Anyway, in two weeks we’ll be headed over to the LA Food Bank (like four or five other Viterbi Orgs already have this year) to help sort and process donations. Next semester we’re trying to organize a partnership with Habitat for Humanity as well.
