Dr. Andrew McCarthy helps unload belongings from a pickup truck into a move-in bin during 2025’s Operation Move In. Photo by Angela Foster.
For years, Dr. Andrew McCarthy saw the emails asking for help and kept moving.
Operation Move In, the annual University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campuswide effort that helps new students and their families settle into residence halls, was not something he thought belonged in his lane. He was hired to teach, write, mentor and handle the work that came with being a faculty member. In his mind, unloading cars and carrying mini-fridges up flights of stairs belonged to somebody else.
Last summer, Erica Holmes Trujillo emailed him directly asking him to volunteer. She told McCarthy that she wanted more people across campus, especially faculty, to understand “how meaningful this experience can be.”
Holmes Trujillo, director of The HUB (Student Success Center) in the College of Arts and Sciences and interim co-director of Integrated Studies, is serving for the second year as co-chair of the OMI Volunteer Coordinator Committee. This year, she asked McCarthy, a UC Foundation associate professor and head of the Department of English, to serve alongside her.
OMI is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, Aug. 19-20, in residential spaces across campus as new students move in. The two-day effort brings together faculty, staff, students and organizations to create a welcoming, supportive environment for incoming students and their families. Volunteer roles include unloading, moving, parking and greeting.
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Those interested in volunteering for Operation Move In can register here. For more information, contact OMI Volunteer Coordinator Committee co-chairs Erica Holmes Trujillo and Dr. Andrew McCarthy at [email protected].
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For McCarthy, what began last year as a favor turned into something else.
After Holmes Trujillo persuaded him to volunteer for OMI 2025, McCarthy worked both days. When it was over, he sent an email to Vice Chancellor of Enrollment Management and Student Affairs Artanya Wesley, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Jerold Hale, and College of Arts and Sciences Dean Pam Riggs-Gelasco.
What he wrote helps explain why he is now co-chairing the volunteer effort for OMI 2026.
“I have been at UTC since 2010 and have long refused to participate in OMI and other similar events, believing this kind of programming was not my responsibility,” he wrote.
“After my experience this year, I realize I was deeply wrong.”
That change did not happen in a meeting room or through a strategic plan. It happened in the rain, on the stairs, inside residence halls, with students’ lives packed into bins and boxes.
McCarthy signed up to help both days last year. He arrived early on a morning marked by heavy rain and uncertainty about how the day would unfold. He remembers getting wet almost immediately thanks to a torrential downpour. The work was harder than advertised. But what stayed with him most was the energy.
“It has summer camp vibes,” he said. “I love summer camp. I was a counselor, I was a camper.
“When you do OMI, people are the thing. This is it. This is why we’re here.”
Chancellor Lori Bruce carries a folded stepladder up a residence hall stairwell during Operation Move In.
Faculty often first meet students in a classroom, seated behind desks, working through assignments and learning how to be students in front of a professor.
McCarthy said OMI offers something different and, in some ways, more revealing.
“You see our students for who they are,” he said. “The students that I get in my classroom three times a week for 50 minutes, that’s not them. That’s them performing as students.”
At OMI, he said, “there is no performance. There are parents trying to keep things moving. There are grandparents cheering from the sidewalk. There are first-generation college students stepping into a new world with family members who may be navigating a college campus for the first time. There are parents dropping off a fourth child and parents dropping off their only child.”
And there are the belongings.
The vacuum cleaners. The televisions. The books. The musical instruments. The totes and containers that hold what a student thinks will matter most in the first weeks away from home.
“There’s something really moving about holding all of their possessions,” McCarthy said. “You really get a clear sense of who our students are and what their needs are when you’re doing that.”
Associate Professor Krysta Murillo points the way as a student and family members arrive with luggage and a move-in bin during Operation Move In.
That realization is at the heart of why Holmes Trujillo wanted McCarthy’s story told.
She has spent years building relationships across campus and helping create systems that support students. When Assistant Director of Academic Initiatives Jason Harville was charged with helping bring back a full, campuswide OMI after the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, Holmes Trujillo said he asked her to help organize volunteers.
She said yes.
“What I like about the volunteer coordinator committee is that it kind of marries two things that are very important to me—leveraging relationships with folks across campus and building systems and processes,” she said.
Holmes Trujillo said OMI is one of her favorite experiences on campus because of the way it opens the year.
“You feel so inspired because the energy at OMI is really just unmatched,” she said.
She also believes the event is stronger now thanks to a fully coordinated, campuswide approach.
“We really have transformed the whole operation of Operation Move In,” she said.
That transformation includes logistics, staffing and coordination, but the story Holmes Trujillo most wanted people to hear was McCarthy’s. She has shared the email he wrote after last year’s event with colleagues across campus because, she said, it gave voice to something many people in student-facing roles experience every day.
“There’s something so powerful about a colleague who has been doing work in higher ed for over a decade having this experience and finding it transformative,” she said. “Andrew’s story of his relationship with OMI is poignant and may inspire more folks to participate.”
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Click here to read Andrew McCarthy’s post-OMI reflection letter.
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McCarthy does not talk about OMI as a nice thing to do if time allows. He talks about it as part of the academic mission.
“This year’s OMI may have been the most important and meaningful experience in my fifteen years at UTC,” he wrote in the email.
“Ultimately, I was left with the conviction that this work is essential to the academic mission of the university because it offers us an important opportunity to really see the student populations we serve.”
Last academic year, he said, was one of the hardest of his career. Even so, he believes he was more successful in the classroom because he had a better sense of who UTC students are before the semester started.
“I feel like those students had the very best of me because I understood who they were,” he said.
He said OMI helped him see that the students in front of him were not abstract ideas or assumptions. They were the students he had watched arrive. They were the students whose families had entrusted UTC with something precious. They were the students carrying hopes, nerves, questions and expectations into a dorm room in August.
That perspective, he said, should matter to faculty.
“If all faculty participated, I just think about how far the needle could move in terms of student success, things like retention, recruitment, all of the things that faculty are like, ‘That’s not really my business,’” he said. “You cannot be unchanged by OMI. You will be changed for the better in a way that will help all of us in some very meaningful ways.”
That sense of obligation runs through both his spoken and written reflections. In the interview, McCarthy said he feels an obligation “as a healthy, able-bodied human.”
In his email, he described what changed by participating as an OMI volunteer.
“I met parents who were dropping off their first student and parents who were dropping off their third or fourth,” he wrote. “I met first-generation college students and their entire, deeply proud extended family. I experienced a whole range of emotions over the course of those two wet, hot and humid days. I realized there is a lot I didn’t know about our students, things you can only learn when you’re carrying their belongings up three flights of stairs on a hot August afternoon. It was a very humbling experience.”
For Holmes Trujillo, that honesty is part of what can move others.
OMI, she said, offers an opportunity for people who do not spend every day in student-facing work to step into that world and see what students and families are carrying, literally and otherwise.
That is one reason the partnership between Enrollment Management and Student Affairs and Academic Affairs matters here.
Holmes Trujillo said that collaboration becomes visible during OMI, “and that matters to families who are seeing UTC for the first time in one of the most emotional moments of the year.”
McCarthy said families can come away thinking “My child is going to be OK here” when they see that kind of collaboration in motion.
McCarthy is making a case to faculty members that this work belongs to them. Not because they need a new committee assignment, or because someone in administration says they should, or because it looks good.
He wrote in his email that he is “not so naïve as to believe that two days lugging personal effects has given me a full understanding of the complexities of the academic affairs-student success nexus.
“But I felt compelled to share my experience with you because I know there is a lot of important work that can be done in bridging student success and academic affairs on this campus. I see now the incredible importance of this work; please consider me an enthusiastic partner as we move forward to support our students and address the various challenges we face in higher education.”
Holmes Trujillo hopes more faculty will decide to be part of that first impression.
“I would love for the entire campus to be involved in those two days of Operation Move In,” she said. “Everywhere you look is ‘Welcome to UTC.’ We are glad you are here.”
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