More than 25 business honors students will use the cafeteria kitchen to bake, pack, label, then deliver over 1,500 freshly baked cookies to students. At Morningside students are nearing midterms and are restless for fall break. Some students will be working over fall break and some will be driving home. Others will relax on campus. No matter what they are planning on doing, most of them have worked busy and tireless schedules during this first quarter. So business honors has created a fundraiser to deliver some love from their parents to soften their load.
Marilyn Eastman, the head of Business honors, describes where Smart Cookies came from. She explained that this year 2023 will be the 5th year of doing smart cookies. It came out of the idea of needing a fundraiser for business honors. “This is because in order to get club funding and to become a club through student government you have to do fundraisers.” The honors group uses the fundraiser for trips and sometimes conferences. This year business honors will take a trip to Omaha.
One of the goals of business honors is to help students network with executives in their field. Not just people doing regular jobs but people doing CEO level jobs and big jobs. Dr. Eastman says she likes to take her students to a city and go to big companies to give them an experience of what it might be like. Because there are a lot of students here at Morningside that come from smaller towns and have probably not traveled much and have not seen what a big corporate office building looks like in a big city. Dr. Eastman says, “I think it is important for students, especially honors students, to aspire to things that maybe they don’t know.”
She went on to say “These honors students are already really bright and hard working so they would have the opportunity to go work for a Deloitte or a Linked In or a Union Pacific. So if students don’t ever know what that is like, how do they know that it is what they want to do?”
In order to have these unique experiences, business honors really wanted to look and find something unique and profitable but not too much work. Dr Eastman came up with the idea of smart cookies after getting a forwarded link from her sister. From Saint Olaf up in Northfield Minnesota the idea blossomed. Dr. Eastman’s niece went there and Dr. Eastman’s sister forwarded her a link where you could order cookies for your students. She brought that idea to the business honors club and they loved the idea. Then that sort of just developed into the Smart Cookies idea.
One aspect that has been a challenge for Jes Lumsden the administrative assistant has been managing the ordering systems. She has to make sure that the order has gone through and that the order has been paid for on separate spreadsheets. The hardest thing to manage, she says, is “Just the systems because they don’t talk, making sure that the payment was made and the order was placed.” This is Jess’s first year managing Smart Cookies and she is hopeful that next year there will be a better system in place.
Once the orders are in, the fundraiser is done all in one night. Business honors uses the cafeteria kitchen to bake the cookies which is not how it has been done in the past. There has been much revision done in the past years to make smart cookies as fool proof as it is now.
When they first started they cooked the cookies in the dorms themselves. So they would bake the cookies in Dimmitt and Roadman and such. That was so complicated and so much work. Another thing that made it more complicated is that instead of using the cookie dough that is already balled they used the scoop out cookie dough which made things more time consuming and complicated. Also the groups were separated and missing out on coming together to accomplish the goal while bonding and building friendships.
So two years ago business honors got the “brilliant idea” to use the cafeteria kitchen. Luckily the Cafeteria has been so generous as to say yes to using it after they close for the night. Which has saved so much time and has made things much easier.
Now all the students that are working on the project can come together all in one place. Creating a space for them to get to know each other. It is hard to get to know each other sometimes on this campus so working together in service is a way to have a bonding experience. Smart cookies serve that objective too. So besides just making money it is a way to get to know each other and bring some really busy and smart students together for a night of working together on something that is actually kind of fun.