I recently saw the film Pay it Forward, a story about a seventh grader named Trevor who receives an assignment for his social studies class to "change the world."

Trevor takes the assignment to heart and designs a system in which he will do a favor for three different people, help them in some way, and those three people will in turn help three other people, and so on.

For some reason, this idea got me thinking about Thon. What if Penn State students applied this idea, albeit modified, to Thon?

What if each Penn State student asked five people to donate $5 to Thon?

Fall enrollment records indicate 42,039 students here at University Park last semester.

If each one of these 40,000+ students asked five people for $5, the Four Diamonds Fund would receive an additional sum of over $1 million.

Of course, like Trevor's idea for his history assignment, this system would never really work. In part, because it too assumes a more utopian world than the one we live in. Not everyone would do it.

Some people might just not care all that much about Thon.

Others might think that they, as only one person, are too miniscule to make a difference.

Not everyone would do it, but we can't control what other people do. We can only control ourselves.

So maybe you can be one of the people who does it.

Be one of the people who does something good that they don't have to do for people they'll likely never meet.

"Pay it Forward" to Thon and help children who need help.

Who knows? One of them might even come up with an idea to change the world.