By Jack Gallery | March 4, 2026
Just over a week ago, Penn State students raised over $18 million for children with pediatric cancer. This past weekend, the same students threw the biggest party of the year: State Patty’s.
State Patty’s Day doesn’t exist on any official calendar; no university office or borough council created it. No administration would ever pass its blessing on such an event. You can’t even credit a specific group of students for creating it. Both the borough and the school have tried to end the tradition, but it has never even made a dent.
THON is not so different of a story. Students created it, students run it, students dance in it, and students cry with each other at the end of it. No administrators conceived the idea of raising $18 million; students did. What was originally a way for fraternities and sororities to give back to the community grew into the largest student-run philanthropy in the world. That’s the throughline. Penn State students don’t wait for permission, and they won’t stop when you tell them no.
Think about what THON is for a minute. Thousands of students who haven’t slept, who have been on their feet for 46 straight hours, crying in each other’s arms at the finish line of something they built together. There is no blueprint for that kind of event, and there is no way to truly replicate an event like it either. No committee gave the green light for the emotion in that building. And if one tried to, they would probably end up making THON less special. Every year raises more money and gets more people to stand for the “full 46,” that isn’t school tradition, that’s culture.
Not every student-run event has gotten the same love from administrations as THON. Gentle Thursday was a counterculture, protest music festival that ran for ten years on the lawn of Old Main before quietly dying in 1981. The Briarwood Bash packed apartment courtyards and spilled into the streets every spring for eleven years before State College police shut it down in 1985. The Phi Psi 500 was a fraternity bar crawl that at its peak had 3,000 students racing between downtown bars in costume. It ran for 25 years before the plug got pulled in 1992. The pattern is always the same. Students build something worth showing up for, the university gets uncomfortable, and eventually someone makes a call. It never really sticks.
Penn State has never had a relaxed relationship with its own student culture, but it’s impossible to win against a grassroots student movement, and State Patty’s is proof. In 2014, the university paid downtown bars to close their doors for the day, a four-tier system. Up to $7,500 per bar, depending on occupancy. To the uninitiated, it sounds absurd for a university to be cutting checks to private businesses to lock out its own students of legal drinking age. The student government passed legislation against it. Most bars refused the money. Students went out anyway.
The origin of State Patty’s is murkier than you’d think. Here’s what’s confirmed: St. Patrick’s Day fell over spring break in 2007, so a student named Joe Veltre made a Facebook event and moved it. That was it. No grand vision, no organization behind it. Just a kid who didn’t want to miss a holiday and a student body that agreed with him. Within a few years, it had outgrown Happy Valley entirely, pulling in students from campuses across the country. It’s now considered one of the top ten collegiate party events in the nation.
Even Veltre himself eventually tried to rein in his creation, calling the event a “runaway train,” in a statement he made to the Daily Collegian. But it didn’t matter; his creation had already outgrown him.
If you walked downtown this past weekend, you could tell there’s not a lot of emphasis on that history. Green is more prevalent than sand in the Sahara. Before noon, bar lines are longer than they have been on any other day of the semester.
This is the embodiment of student culture being allowed to run wild. The students who show up every year will tell you that’s exactly the point.
There’s a reason people come back for this. More than just students, people visit from across the country to experience the uniquely Penn State event. From a Facebook group to a multi-hour flight, State Patty’s has become something nobody can explain, except the people who’ve done it.
“State Patties the most lively I’ve seen campus since I’ve been here,” said freshman, Christian Covello. “Penn State takes pride in State Patty’s; it’s a day everyone comes together and celebrates.”
Yet standing in the middle of downtown, you get a sense that everybody is unified by what they’re a part of, unknowingly connected to each other. That is Penn State. THON and State Patty’s look like opposites on the surface, one noble and emotional, the other loud and defiant. But both were built by students with no plan and little authority behind them. Now, both are bigger than anyone could have ever planned. That’s what sticks with people. The same students who danced at THON still tune into the final total every February. And the students who celebrated State Patty’s a decade ago still visit Happy Valley for that special weekend. Penn State culture is different from its tradition because it doesn’t leave after graduation. Being a current student isn’t a prerequisite to experiencing the pride of belonging to something that you know you helped create, and standing next to the people who helped create it with you.
Jack Gallery is a freshman journalism student at Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. His niche is somewhere between urban culture, fashion, and contemporary communication and linguistics. Based in State College and Chicago, he’s expanding his reporting around Penn State and the wider Happy Valley area.
