Ut Prosim: That I May Serve

1896 was a busy year in Blacksburg. The General Assembly gave the school a new name, Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute, which everybody shortened to VPI. The old black and gray gave way to orange and maroon. And according to Virginia Tech’s traditions page, those same changes brought a college seal and a motto: Ut Prosim, "That I May Serve."

Plenty of schools have Latin mottos nobody can translate. Tech’s is different, because Hokies actually act on it. You can see it on a spring Saturday in the New River Valley, and you can hear it in the siren of a student-run ambulance.

The Big Event started in 2002. It is a student-run day of service each spring in Blacksburg, Christiansburg and across the New River Valley, and the point of it is simple: to say thank you to the community that hosts the university.

The idea did not start in Blacksburg. The Big Event concept began at Texas A&M in 1982. Tech took it and ran. Virginia Tech’s engagement office bills its version as the second largest event of its kind in the United States, and in 2019 Tech hosted the national Big Event conference.

The numbers tell the story. The first Big Event in 2002 drew 475 volunteers. By 2019 it drew 7,820. The peaks came in 2016, with 9,200 volunteers, and in 2019, with 1,180 projects.

Then COVID canceled the 2020 and 2021 events. The Big Event came back. On April 6, 2024, about 5,000 volunteers took on 465 projects. On April 5, 2025, 5,252 volunteers took on 855.

That is a lot of Saturday work, done by students who could have slept in.

The Virginia Tech Rescue Squad began in 1969 with four students the squad’s history calls "the Tech Four": Thomas Spain, Bobby Smallwood, Wayne Modena and Richard Paul, all Class of 1973. They had tried to volunteer with the Blacksburg crew and were turned away for being students. So they built their own.

They drafted a constitution in December 1969. The Commission for Undergraduate Student Affairs approved the squad on April 2, 1970, and it was formally recognized on May 21, 1970.

The squad’s own history says it answered 47 calls by the end of May 1970, using members’ own cars. There was no ambulance yet.

That changed on Jan. 21, 1972, when the first ambulance, unit 131 (later 15-1), was delivered. From 1973 to 1980 the squad ran as a unit of the Blacksburg First Aid Crew, then split off on its own. In its early years it worked out of Squires Student Center, first in room 320 and then 319.

In 1982 the squad became the first full advanced life support service in the area. In 2000 it received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding EMS Agency.

On April 16, 2007, the Rescue Squad responded. That day belongs to the 32 Hokies who were killed and to the people who loved them, and the squad was among those who answered.

The squad and VT News describe it as the oldest volunteer, all-student collegiate rescue squad in the country. Wikipedia lists it as the second oldest, behind Saint Michael’s Fire & Rescue. Either way, it is one of the oldest, and it is still entirely students.

As of its 50th anniversary in 2019, VT News reported about 1,200 calls a year, around 45 members and a budget of about $170,000. Members often give 40 or more hours a week, on top of being full-time students.

Ut Prosim shows up in smaller ways, too. Since 1977, Army ROTC’s Ranger Company has run the game ball 100 miles around campus during homecoming week, ending with the ball carried into Lane Stadium.

The Lunch Pail, the coal miner’s pail that came to stand for Bud Foster’s blue-collar defense, now holds the names of the 32 Hokies killed on April 16, 2007.

And Thanksgiving has long been a community holiday here. For more than half of Tech’s history, Thanksgiving week meant the VMI game in Roanoke, with dances, dinners and parades, usually followed by a Sunday feast in the College Mess Hall. A menu from 1924 survives in Special Collections.

A motto is just words until people decide to live by it. At Tech, a Latin phrase picked in 1896 turned into a spring Saturday when thousands of students show up to work, and into an ambulance service started by four students who would not take no for an answer.

That I May Serve. It is printed on the seal. It is easier to read in what Hokies do.