Sometimes silence speaks louder than words.

That was the idea behind yesterday's PSU Day of Silence. "This is what we'd like to think of as a silent scream," event spokeswoman Kelly Ross said.

About 300 students took a pledge to remain silent for eight hours to raise awareness about all kinds of oppression on campus.

The day concluded at a speak-out celebration last night. Before the pledge ended at 6 p.m., the only sounds that could be heard in the Pollock Rec Room were those of rustling papers and furniture being moved.

Minutes later, Raina León (senior-journalism) read a poem to break the silence, and told the audience to do the same. "It's time for a change. Open your mouth and scream!" she said.

With this encouragment, the participants filled the room with screams and the honking of noisemakers.

Then, students were given the opportunity to tell the audience about their experiences and the thoughts they had throughout the day.

"The hardest thing for me was not not talking to other people, but not talking to myself," Rachel Frankel (freshman-philosophy and communications, arts and sciences) said.

Participants said they got a variety of reactions from people on campus during the day. "I was kind of hurt by the fact that a lot of people saw me and just turned their heads. They ignored me," Blythe Hart (freshman-theatre) said.

There was also outright opposition to the project, Ross said.

"There are people who say, 'Oh, that's stupid,' and those tend to be the same people who say, 'Oh, that's so gay,' " she said.

Many participants said they truly knew what it felt like to be oppressed after not talking all day, and they did not enjoy it. "I know from this point on, I'm going to use my experience today to push me to speak whenever I need to," Elizabeth Eisenhart (senior-journalism and political science) said.

The goal of the project was to recognize that oppression exists and work toward openness about it, said Manish Vaidya, the event's facilitator.

"The Day of Silence is about survival, about moving from victim to survivor," he said.

The participants' silence was representative of the silencing of people on campus based on a variety of aspects, from sexual orientation and gender identity to race and religion.

"This is a program that will actually go into the classroom," Ross said. "People notice if someone in a class, especially in a small class, is just not speaking."

Morgan Masterman, co-director of the Speak-Out, also said the effectiveness of the silence was in the fact that it was seen and heard throughout the day, in classes and around campus. "When you visualize something, it makes more of a statement," she said.