Call it a labor of love or an act of gratitude, but an estimated record 22,500 Texas A&M University students are scheduled for volunteer work on 2,700 jobs in the communities surrounding their campus in the annual Big Event service project on April 2.
The students planning the Big Event this year say they have as their goal making it the biggest and best yet.
This unique service project began in 1982 with just six Aggies who volunteered to clean up a local cemetery as a way to thank the Bryan/College Station community that welcomed them when they came to study at Texas A&M.
In the last few years, increasingly large numbers of Aggies have participated in Big Event. They take on a multitude of jobs ranging from cleaning yards to painting to making repairs.
Already the largest such service project in the nation, Big Event has expanded to 110 other schools across the nation and now to schools in Spain, Australia, Germany, Pakistan and Italy.
Bright and early Saturday, legions of Texas A&M students will gather in The Zone outside Kyle Field and, with the firing of a cannon by the Corps of Cadets’ Parsons Mounted Cavalry, will pick up paint and brushes, rakes, shovels and other tools and fan out across the Bryan-College Station community to tackle their assigned jobs.
The student leaders who have worked on this year’s Big Event and helped expand it to a historic level say they are ready for the big day and add that they “can’t wait to see the Aggie Spirit in action.”
Black teachers in the segregated South – especially women – played critical roles in preserving knowledge that might’ve otherwise been lost to history.