For Stevens students, celebrating Thanksgiving means working the parade in New York City

HOBOKEN, N.J. — With tests coming up and papers due soon, pulling an all-nighter is not unusual for college students this time of year. But an all-nighter on Thanksgiving eve?

That’s what about 50 students from Stevens Institute of Technology do each year. For the past 15 years, Stevens students have worked with the big balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  The students’ volunteer work involves staying up very late Thanksgiving eve, inflating and otherwise preparing balloons for the parade (sometimes there’s time for a little shut-eye, sometimes not), and then working with Macy’s staff during the parade itself.

"I really can’t imagine Thanksgiving without it," says 22-year-old Patricia Clinton, a Stevens senior majoring in chemical biology. Clinton and her best friend, Harmony Semf, have been volunteering to work the parade for the last five years.

Semf, a 21-year-old senior in engineering physics, admits she’s usually "falling asleep at the table" when she finally gets home to her family at the end of the day on Thanksgiving.

But as long as there’s a parade, "there’s no where else I’d rather be,"  she says.

The students begin working with Macy’s parade staff in early November, attending training sessions and working with the parade’s newest balloons during test flights on the Stevens athletic field in Hoboken, N.J. (this year’s test flights were on Nov. 6).

The afternoon before Thanksgiving, the students are bussed to New York’s Central Park to begin their work preparing and inflating the balloons for the parade the next morning. Initial inflation takes place the night before Thanksgiving, and there’s the "topping off" of the balloons early the next morning, says Semf.

Next comes morning training sessions for the parade’s balloon handlers, which the students help to teach, having already been through the stringent training themselves.

Most of the students walk the parade route with the balloons. Just being a part of the parade is exciting, they report. "You watch the faces of children light up, and you feel like a kid again," says Clinton.

For Semf and Clinton — and many other Stevens students as well — working the parade has become a tradition. "The parade is our thing to do together," says Clinton, noting that this year both she and Semf convinced their boyfriends, also Stevens students, to participate.

Elias Pinto, another Stevens senior marking his fifth year with the parade, says the science education that students receive at Stevens helps them know what they’re dealing with when it comes to the helium-filled balloons. This year, he hopes to be a co-pilot for one of the balloons.

"We’re highly qualified from the technical side," he says. "We know enough about natural science to know how these balloons will behave.

"Walking the two-mile parade route isn’t always easy, admits Semf.   "Last year it rained on our parade," she recalls with a quick smile. But cold feet and squishy shoes notwithstanding, this volunteer work is most definitely a labor of love.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870 and celebrating 140 Years of Innovation, Stevens Institute of Technology, The Innovation University TM , lives at the intersection of industry, academics and research.  The University's students, faculty and partners leverage their collective real-world experience and culture of innovation, research and entrepreneurship to confront global challenges in engineering, science, systems and technology management.

Based in Hoboken, N.J. and with a location in Washington, D.C., Stevens offers baccalaureate, master’s, certificates and doctoral degrees in engineering, the sciences and management, in addition to baccalaureate degrees in business and liberal arts.  Stevens has been recognized by both the US Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security as a National Center of Excellence in the areas of systems engineering and port security research. The University has a total enrollment of more than 2,200 undergraduate and 3,700 graduate students with almost 450 faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America as well as strategic partnerships with industry leaders, governments and other universities around the world.  Additional information may be obtained at www.stevens.edu and www.stevens.edu/press.