UM Launches ‘The Big Event’ to Bookend the Academic Year
University of Montana students participate in UM’s inaugural The Big Event, a day of service and celebration to end the academic year. One of the service projects was scraping and preparing UM’s iconic M landmark on Mount Sentinel for painting. UM photo by Marley Barboeisel
MISSOULA – When finals week arrives and summer is around the corner, there are many ways college students choose to celebrate the end of an academic year. At the University of Montana, students come together for a full day of service first – and celebrate later.
UM’s Office of New Student Success launched “The Big Event” on Saturday, April 25, as the inaugural bookend to the academic year. The event is UM’s version of a student-run national day of service that more than 100 other colleges and universities participate in. It originated at Texas A&M University in 1982. The Big Event focuses on thanking the wider Missoula community for UM support, through service activities.
At UM, the connection between service, community and celebration felt natural, said Devin Carpenter, UM director of New Student Success.
“The ethos of The Big Event is already so embedded into who we are as a campus,” Carpenter said. “Not only is the day centered on service, it brings students together in a meaningful way as we wrap up the academic year. It’s an experience and a feeling that students carry into the summer, and one that gets them excited to return.”
Carpenter said UM’s version of The Big Event is intended to culminate the academic year in the spring for first-year students, paralleling the Big Sky Experience, a weeklong series of events intended to help UM’s newest students immerse into the Missoula community. The programming of the Big Sky Experience was awarded the “Most Innovative Program” in 2020 by the National Association for Orientation, Transition and Retention in Higher Education, for boosting student success and community engagement.
More than 170 students participated in Saturday’s event, taking part in service activities such as weeding, planting and leaf cleanup at local neighborhood yards, repairing playground equipment at Paxson Elementary School, organizing bike gear at Free Cycles and replacing the first 30 feet of the M Trail with a clay mixture.
The teams returned after an afternoon of service to celebrate on UM’s Oval, where several local bands, food trucks and merchant vendors – including Missoula local outdoor sandal company, Bedrock Sandals.
One group of second-year students hiked up the M Trail to scrape off paint ahead of a large-scale repainting project this spring.
Ethan Barnicoat, from Helena, is double majoring in management information systems and cybersecurity in UM’s College of Business, attended with friends and roommates, Tyler Datema and Zach Diveley.
In his role promoting the University as a UM Advocate, a student group within the Associated Students of UM, Barnicoat grabbed his roommates to participate in the day– an opportunity they embraced, even if it meant hiking 650 feet up the M Trail on a Saturday afternoon in cold spring weather.
“For me this kind of work isn’t really work,” Barnicoat said. “It’s a beautiful day, I’m out with friends, on top of the M Trail, and we’re helping take care of something that represents pride of the University.”
Datema, an accounting major in UM’s College of Business from Alabama, said he made friends quickly at UM through the Freshman Wilderness Experience, and felt a similar thread in The Big Event.
“I have friends that I still talk to from that trip,” Datema said. “It’s these kinds of experiences and events where it’s easy to make connections and friends – the kind that surprise you with how quickly they form here. I wouldn’t want to be at a university that’s any bigger than this, for that reason.”
Thomas Krebs, from Maryland, is majoring in public health in UM’s College of Health. He said the service component is something that connects across generations.
“Its special when you consider how many generations of former students had a hand in repainting and repairing the M, and we get to continue that today,” Krebs said. “Everybody always looks up to the M.”
Jamie Kirby, UM maintenance services manager and UM alumna, organized the activity in preparation for a large-scale repaint project of the M Trail before UM’s Commencement ceremonies in May.
Kirby said the support from The Big Event was an immense help to campus, folding in a student experience rooted in stewardship of Montana’s most-hiked trail and an iconic UM landmark.
“Some of the paint we scraped off was more than 50 years old,” Kirby said. “To have these students help today not only impacts the project, but it ties in their experience with something that we all love and treasure.”
Kirby said the M will be painted with the same high-tech, self-cleaning paint used on the Hollywood sign in coming days.
“So, in a way, the M is a getting the Hollywood makeover,” she said.
Carpenter said UM’s The Big Event was a success, and he hopes to see it grow in the future.
“I see this first year as a framework for what it could be, and that’s really exciting,” he said.
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