Sleepy students with open textbooks sat at tables and chairs around the Memorial Union food court Wednesday morning, nursing their Starbucks concoctions while the machines behind the coffee shop’s counters whistled away.
A disheveled man wearing a cardboard sign broadcasting the approaching end of the world around his neck wandered around warning students, but otherwise, everything looked normal.
Just a few minutes later, these early morning studiers were in the middle of a flash mob.
It began with a student taking an elaborate fall, while one peer walked by him and another helped him up.
All three of the students, as well as the man pretending to warn the MU’s occupants about the end of the world, were part of communication professor Sandra Rath’s 7:30 a.m. public speaking class.
Rath first developed the idea of doing a flash speech mob last semester after noticing her students were becoming too familiar with their audience.
“It’s good to be uncomfortable in public speaking,” she said. “When you reach that comfort level at the end of the semester after you know the audience, you’re not learning anymore.”
Accounting junior Shyla Sebastian watched Wednesday morning’s event and was part of last semester’s class.
She said she learned a lot from participating in the end-of-semester flash mob.
“It gets you out of the classroom and in front of people you don’t know,” Sebastian said.
Her class last year chose to theme its flash mob on the Undergraduate Student Government’s Walk Your Wheels campaign, but this year’s class chose the theme of pushing acts of kindness forward.
Biochemistry junior Garrett Seymore, one of Rath’s students, helped develop the idea.
Seymore and his classmates created the ASU Smiles campaign, a movement designed to promote smiles and kind acts directed toward strangers on the ASU campus.
“I don’t think anyone can change the world by doing one thing, but if everyone does one thing, you can change the world that way,” Seymore said.
Wednesday’s event focused on this idea of everyone doing something to help somebody else.
Each of the approximately 20 students in Rath’s class shared either a fact about smiling — like how cracking a grin increases the presence of disease-fighting T cells and causes a rush in serotonin and dopamine — or a story of a time they were on the giving or receiving end of a random act of kindness.
One student spoke about the day she found out that the person in front of her in a drive-thru line paid for her coffee so she could do the same for the car behind her.
Another shared how he only had a $20 bill to pay for groceries that ended up costing a little more than $20, but the woman behind him handed him a dollar to pay his tab.
These stories and facts were mixed with a chant of “pay it forward” by all the students involved.
Business communications freshman Cameron Daniel, who was sitting in the MU throughout the impromptu performance, said he agreed with the student speakers.
“I was a little surprised at first,” Daniel said. “But I agreed with it. I more or less already give back what I can.”
Sustainability junior Jake Swanson, who portrayed the end-of-days fanatic, said the flash mob could probably have been more successful if it had taken place at a time when the MU was more crowded.
“I saw one smile,” he said. “It’s a smiles campaign, so I’m happy.”
Reach the news editor at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
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