Class Registers 198 Students to Vote in Group Project
Junior Abby Hans and freshman Steven Thelusma work the voter registration table in the South Campus gazebo for their Honors Marketing Principles class' 'Rock the Vote' final project.
04/30/2015
By Ed Brennen
As a member of the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133, Thelusma was on his second tour of Afghanistan in 2012. The Equipment Operator 3rd Class from Roslindale, was driving an armored tractor trailer when his convoy was struck with an improvised explosive device.
Thelusma suffered a traumatic brain injury in the attack, as well as injuries to his shoulder and lower back, but was able to recover and complete his deployment — eventually coming home with a Purple Heart award.
So when he and his classmates in Adjunct Prof. Deb Casey’s Honors Marketing Principles class recently held a two-day “Rock the Vote” voter registration drive on campus for their final project, Thelusma was all in.
“I definitely want a big push for students to register because a lot of the stuff that I used to do overseas is about us fighting for our rights,” Thelusma said while asking students passing through the South Campus gazebo on a Tuesday afternoon if they’d like to take two minutes to register. “It means a lot to me to see the kind of results that we’re having.”
The Honors class ended up registering 198 students over the two-day period, easily surpassing its goal of 150.
“We had a pretty high goal, so to go through whole process and see it succeed is pretty cool,” said junior finance major Justin Pawlowski, who added that he enjoyed the hands-on aspect of planning and executing a marketing project. “It’s a real thing, not just something from a book, which I’ve been doing since high school. It was really valuable.”
The Honors class, comprised of 30 students from a diverse range of majors including marketing, engineering, finance, history and computer science, began the semester-long project by surveying 150 fellow students about voting. Besides asking if they were registered (62 percent said they were), the survey also asked what might keep them from actually going to the polls on Election Day.
“A lot of people said they felt like their vote didn’t count,” said Abby Hans, a junior marketing major who, in addition to contacting Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin for registration information, designed the project’s promotional posters. “What we want to do is let students know that they’re not just voting for a candidate, but also issues that affect them like student loans.”
According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), only 21.5 percent of young people (ages 18-29) nationwide voted in the 2014 midterm elections, while 45 percent of young people voted in 2012.
Erika Petipas, a sophomore majoring in history, counts herself among that majority of young people who don’t go to the polls. She said participating in the project has changed that.
“I actually was never really interested in voting until this,” she said, “but its definitely opened my eyes to see how many people our age aren’t registered to vote.”
Fellow sophomore John Kilgo, a computer science major who has run his own web consulting business since high school, said the project has given him new insight into marketing.
“We’ve learned how to run a marketing plan from start to finish,” Kilgo said. “We’ve done all the research, came up with ideas to promote it and run the event. Thinking about how I construct my websites, I know how I can better advertise a small business from this class.”
This is the second year Casey has taught the marketing principles class. As a half dozen of her students manned the registration table set up on Day 2 outside of Cumnock Hall, she said she was impressed with their results.
“They’re learning it’s not as easy as they thought to run an event. As a nonprofit, you have to have a good story and you have to engage people,” said Casey, who added that the students even devised a way to work around passing rain on Day 1. “They came up with a guerilla marketing idea of taking umbrellas and walking people from the busses to their classes, which I thought was really good.”