Simpson College has “it.”

More than 400 students, faculty, staff and administrative members participated last week in Campus Day, themed “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

This year more than 40 teams participated, made up of five to 30 members. All of them had the same goal: serving the Indianola community.

“I believe that Campus Day is such a great activity for Simpson College,” said junior Ryan Steinbach. “It gives the students a chance to get together and do something constructive and helpful for our community.”

Campus Day started big when around 300 students attended the kick-off event, bingo, to try to win prizes such as a 20-inch TV-DVD set, an iPod Shuffle and a PlayStation Portable.

Even though the number of volunteers exceeded expectations, they were all put to work. The Campus Day Committee found plenty of jobs for the teams to do. Some were assigned the night before.

“Wesley Woods called the day before Campus Day and asked for 40 more people than we were expecting,” said junior Erin Disney, Campus Day co-chair.

Disney also said there were some yards that didn’t get raked, but that’s simply because they didn’t know how many students would actually participate and how many people the other activities would need.

There were a lot of new service projects this year. The activities weren’t limited to raking as they have been in the past. This year students were given choices of what activity they wanted to do, from volunteering at Kiya Koda Humane Society to yardwork for Indianola residents.

In fact, there were a couple of teams that created their own Campus Day activity. One such activity was the cleaning and general maintenance done on the Carver House.

“We wanted to focus on alternative activities, the raking was not our top priority this year, and we tried our best to get to every activity,” Disney said. “Instead of telling everyone that Campus Day is all about raking, we let students tell us what they wanted to do.”

Another change this year was that students didn’t need an adviser to form a team. Students could form an all-student group and perform the tasks they wanted to.

“It was really fun, this year, to work with other campus staff members, and to have our own grounds crew instruct, encourage and support us,” said Jan Everhart, the director of the Lilly Initiative for Vocational Exploration. “It was a great day, good energy, and the student organizers did a great job.”

Disney hopes the success of this year’s Campus Day will be repeated in years to come.

“We only hope to keep making Campus Day better, [and it] has happened in the past two years,” Disney said.