By Ronica Stromberg
About 80 School of Natural Resources employees and students celebrated Earth Day on April 21 on the back lawn of Hardin Hall. They took part in activities like viewing a newly installed bat house, listening to music, eating pizza and ice cream and throwing pies in colleagues' faces.
Ten professors and administrators volunteered to have whipped cream pies thrown in their faces as a fundraiser for the Student Excellence Fund, which supports student experiences and equipment. The school's student ambassadors, Sophia Rojas, Charlie Krug, William Cunningham and Jane Jewell, organized the Earth Day celebration and came up with the idea to sell raffle tickets for a dollar each for purchasers to have the chance to throw a pie into the faces of the 10 volunteers.
"Hats off to the professors that participated in this," said Kenneth Pyle, the student success coach who oversaw the students with the rest of the academic advising team. "I mean, I know you become a doctor and a professor, and that's a very serious thing, and that pieing was a very non-serious thing. It was a lot of fun, and I think everybody laughed."
Pyle said the pie-throwing served as a stress reliever for some people at this point of the semester. He took a couple of pies to the face himself and said it was a first-time experience but tasty.
"I don't usually have whipped cream, but the whipped cream had some cookie crumbles in there, and I was just like, 'All right, let's go,'" he said. "But I will say it was pretty disgusting, like, later at 5 o'clock, I had a class to go to, and I just stuck my finger in my ear, and I had gooey whipped cream in my ear still."
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