Honoring A Great Professor

I was sitting at a Team Captain's meeting when the Surivorship Chairperson gave a presentation about how they wanted to start a campaign to honor VT professors and students who were cancer survivors.  I turned to my friend Annalee and we both had the same idea....honoring our Introductory Psychology Professor.  We immediately began planning how to surprise him with luminaries in his honor.  She went and spoke with the other Intro Psych professor and I began thinking of days to collect money.  She made flyers to hand out on Monday & Tuesday at the start of classes, that said we were putting together a surprise for our professor: we would be collecting money the next class to donate to the VTRelay in honor of our professor in the form of luminaries.

The planning went off without a hitch and we were able to raise enough money for 50 LUMINARIES!! We were stunned that we raised that much money in 2 days and that our professor never knew!

A few days later she and I began making all of the luminaries like the ones below:

For more images of the Luminaries visit my Picasa web album by following this link.

We then planned to meet early before the Tuesday/Thursday lecture and set all of them up before our professor arrived.  With the help of a few friends we were able to set them all up before most of the class even arrived and were able to see the reaction of Dr. Geller's face when he arrived to give his lecture.  The look on his face was worth all of the planning and hoping that he wouldn't find out, he was honored beyond words.  Dr. Geller is not only a fantastic Psychology professor but also a cancer survivor and a Hokie.  We were honored to have him as a professor and knew we wanted to give something back.

If you ever have the chance to give back to a survivor, I highly recommend it because they are why We Relay.

Until We Find a Cure.