The 2006-2007 academic year presents the final opportunity to buy a “Kiss More Nurses” t-shirt, a two-year fund-raising project from the Calvin chapter of the Student Nurses Association.

“This year, we made them more gender neutral,” says senior Deb Dykhouse, the association president, of the shirts, which sport pink lips with the slogan on a gray background. (Last year’s model featured red lips on a pink background).

The t-shirt began as a button modeled after“Calvin Choices,” a three-year, anti-alcohol campaign sponsored by the Student Life division beginning in 2003-04. The slogans of that campaign -- “Sleep More,” “Grow More,” “Kiss More,” for example -- suggested clever alternatives to drinking.

The student nurses expanded the latter injunction to “Kiss More Nurses” and created their own marketable product, which became a t-shirt the following year.

“It was something that we could kind of take and run with, while supporting, in essence, the anti-alcohol campaign and making it uniquely ours,” Dykhouse says.

The association will discontinue selling the t-shirt after this year because the message it displays is becoming enigmatic.

“New students do not remember the Calvin Choices campaign,” Dykhouse says. “The slogan on its own, it portrays something completely different than what it was intended to. Standing on its own, it’s out of context."

Thus far this year, the student nurses have sold 90 shirts, and the proceeds will help defray the cost of the annual May pinning ceremony for graduates of the program.

Though the student nurses officially graduate with their class as do other majors, the day they receive their nursing pins is both a special recognition and a nod to the nursing profession of yore, Dykouse says.

“Pinning is like a personal graduation for the nursing department. It’s a more intimate ceremony. Traditionally nurses would receive pins when they received their licenses. It was part of the moving-on process. Nurses in the hospitals would wear them. You still see them in the hospital,” she adds, “but it’s not as prevalent."