With the exception of Thanksgiving, this past canning weekend was really the first time Penn State students got a chance to go out and see how people outside the State College bubble would react towards the Penn State community in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

From what some of us here at Onward State and our friends experienced, it seems like there has been a mixed reception.

Brian Derr:

I canned outside Pittsburgh and thought that people responded pretty fairly. It seemed like any other canning trip that I went on before the scandal. I only had two experiences from this past weekend. First, one driver stopped and said, “One man doesn’t represent an entire university. Penn State is still great.” But of course there is always ‘that guy’ and in this case it was a man screaming “child molesters” out of his truck as he drove by. Others in my group had a few more negative ones than I did but in the end everyone said that there were more positive responses than bad ones. Usually, people who had a bias against PSU just stayed quiet and didn’t donate.

John Tecce:

I canned in Wyckoff, New Jersey. We had two girls bring us hot chocolate, which was nice, but the overwhelming reaction we received was that of curiosity. Many asked how the mood on campus was, how we felt about everything, and whether things have calmed down at all. But we also felt some blowback from the Sandusky scandal. One individual, when asked to give, said “not to Penn State,” and we heard a few crude ‘Sandusky jokes’, as they’re now called. We even had a sad incident when the father of a Penn State freshman who knew Courtney O’Bryan, and who had also lost her mother two weeks ago, talked with us for a while.

We want to hear from you! For those of you who were out this past weekend what did you hear? Was it a good or bad experience? How did people react when they found out you were from Penn State? Will you go canning again next time? Anything you think people should hear.