Celebrate. Remember. Fight Back.

This weekend (or as of 12 p.m. today) ONU's Relay for Life took place on the tundra from a 6 p.m. kick off on Friday until just a few hours ago when we announced the total money raised, took our closing lap around the track and began to tear down the tents and stage. I've been involved with the cause for three years now and for a lot of reasons in my family, it's something that is extremely important to me. My sophomore year, I was on a team called A Walk to Remember with many of my friends and roommates on campus and we ended up being the team who raised the most money while I was in at least the top five, if not three, for participants who raised the most individually. This year, I had the opportunity to be one of the chairs of the publicity team for ONU's Colleges Against Cancer committee. I was so excited to be able to do a lot more hands on work as far as PR and communications went, and outside of everything I've done for Firm already. But when I started going to meetings, I realized that it was a lot more unorganized than I had imagined, especially my own committee, which comprised of myself and one other person. It was my first true experience in a working situation with objectives, goals and deadlines to meet, where I had to pick up a lot of the slack for things that should have been done far in advanced, but had yet to be accomplished. Had I been informed of these meetings sooner (because said individual isn't very good with responding to emails) then I know I would have taken enough initiative to make sure our PR efforts didn't fall behind.

It was also an experience where at first, I felt as though I was lost and without much direction at all, which should only provoke that desire to take initiative, but it's difficult when it's your first year doing something new without the help of others. I had no idea where to even begin. I had all of these ideas to promote the cause and spread the word on campus, but it was like no one was listening to what I had to say, or they were so set in their ways of how they've done things in the past, that my ideas were being tossed out the window. I guess, too, that's something I'll need to get used to. But once I got into the groove of doing things on my own, because my co-chair was less than helpful throughout most of campaign, I found that the resources I did have were very helpful and very timely. That made me happy, being someone who tries to be as prompt as possible with responses. But by the time relay came around, I realized that while I was frustrated and didn't have the opportunity to do as much as I would have liked, the stress was worth it. We had a great turnout and I really enjoyed myself this year. I also wish this wouldn't be the only year that I was able to contribute to the committee, because now I know what I could and would have done, should I have been able to take over. My plan, however, is to recruit one of our very lovely PRSSA underclassmen to take over for me and hopefully I can pass along ideas that I had and see them put into place.

Like I said, the entire event was worth the hassle that everything seemed to be at times. While I amount of teams we had this year wasn't nearly as high as what it was in previous years, we were still about to raise $15,200 for the cause. And oddly enough, my role as the publicity co-chair and seeing the success we had this weekend, made me think that if I ever did work for a non-profit organization, the American Cancer Association would be the one.