Students clean up campus

Stephen Ojeda-Britez and Travis Register clean up around the creek and under the bridge on the SUNY Poly Utica campus.

The popular longtime children’s show host Fred Rogers once said “I hope you’re proud of yourself for the times you’ve said ‘yes,’ when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to somebody else.”

And the student members of the SUNY Poly Student Government at Utica Sustainability Committee personify that pride in the extra work done to help the world at large – creating a better environment and maintaining a beautiful campus through clean-ups efforts this past spring.

The sustainability committee’s goals are to advocate for the enhance efficient and sustainability of the institution, to collect data and gauge the efficiency and sustainability of the campus, as well as to compile and forward a yearly report on the Committee’s finding and recommendations to the Associate Provost.

“As part of our goals, in the committee we discussed doing a campus-wide cleanup event in order to both keep the environment clean and also to keep the campus beautiful,” said Travis Register, a Senator of SUNY Poly Government and chair of the Sustainability Committee. “Bags, gloves, trash pickers, and buckets were donated or lent to us by the Keep Mohawk Beautiful Initiative and SUNY Poly facilities.”

Stephen Ojeda-Britez and Travis Register clean up around the creek and under the bridge on the SUNY Poly Utica campus.

Travis, along with fellow Senators Alex Turner (also co-chair of the Sustainability Committee), Nick Markessinis, and concerned student participant Stephen Ojeda-Britez have made their way throughout the campus, planting flowers and small bushes near the front entrance of Donovan Hall, and picking up trash items wherever they found it, including under the bridges and along the treelines to and from the residence halls.

“I’ve taken part in many cleanups, and like all the rest I feel both dirty, sweaty, but satisfied with what I’ve done at the end of it all. I enjoy volunteering my time towards cleaning things (as long as it’s not my room). I try to stick by the saying ‘Leave it better than you found it.’ when it comes to cleaning up the outdoors. At the end, I feel my time is worth it so someone down the line can still enjoy nature as much as I do, because the environment I still as pristine and as beautiful as when I was there.”