The College of Pharmacy gave back to the UH community Thursday when 56 of its Phi Delta Chi fraternity members set out to clean up the campus.
Students met in front of the Science and Research Building 1, where they put on latex gloves, grabbed trash bags and spread out across campus to pick up trash in several organized groups from 4 to 5 p.m.
PDC members Marwan Ahmed and Trang Tran paused while determining their routes to discuss their motivations for helping.
“We’re pledging for Phi Delta Chi,” said Ahmed. “PDC is all about service and giving back to the community, so cleaning up the campus is our method of helping out.
“PDC is a pharmacy-based fraternity, and it’s a professional fraternity. One of our projects in the pledging process is to do a service event, so we decided to help clean up our campus because we want it to look nice and to keep it tidy,” said Tran.
According to The American Pharmacists Association, October is American Pharmacists Month, which calls for a time to recognize pharmacists’ contributions and to educate the public and other health-care professionals about the role of pharmacists.
Part of being a Tier One University is taking note of such occasions and being involved in giving back, said Daniel Nguyen, a PDC member.
“We are trying to represent what a Tier One student should be like. We are graduate students so we want to show that we like UH,” said Nguyen. “We do a lot of service and usually go off campus, but this is one thing where we are actually on campus giving back to our own school.”
Pharmacy student and Vice President of PDC Thuy Vo organized the cleanup event in honor of Pharmacists Month and to let students know that The College of Pharmacy exists.
“We all had on maroon shirts. People kept coming up and asking us what we were doing; I think it was a good way of spreading the message,” said Vo. “I don’t know if there’s still going to be a ban on smoking on campus, but we picked up a lot of cigarette butts.”
While other fraternities from The College of Pharmacy are aimed at accomplishing a variety of things, PDC member Nancy Johnson sees her fraternity as one with a specific goal in mind.
“Each of the fraternities from pharmacy stand for one thing, and we are known for our service. We are even active with St. Jude,” said Johnson.
“All of the fraternities do good things, but we are just trying to give back,” said Nguyen. “I don’t think you usually see graduate students get out, because we are usually studying, but we want to show that we do get out.”