Misericordia University’s mailroom reached a new record of 20,000 package deliveries during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The mailroom team in Banks Hall celebrated its 20,000th package delivery as a milestone, surpassing the previous record of 14,000 packages delivered during the calendar years 2019 and 2020.

“I think hitting 20,000 is huge,” said Jenn Martin, a mailroom employee. “I mean it’s the best; it’s amazing. I can’t believe we’ve done that with the amount of people that are working in here, too.

“I don’t know if it’s due to the pandemic or to people doing more online shopping,” Martin added.  “We have less students on campus now than we did pre-pandemic, but we’re still doing more packages. We’re about 6,000 more packages this year so far than any other year.”

Prior to the pandemic, getting a package was a longer process. Students would give their name, scan their IDs and a mailroom worker would then sign the package out. It was a long and tedious process. A new system is now in place that not only lessens contact, but also streamlines package delivery and pickup processes together. Students need only a mobile phone to access a scannable QR code emailed from the campus post office.

One of the mailroom’s biggest challenges for this year is handling larger deliveries on days less team members are present. Their busiest day, as Martin describes, was the first day of freshman orientation, where a department received a grand order of 220 boxes.

“That was a crazy day for us and we didn’t have our work studies working for us yet, so Edmund and I had to do most of that,” Martin said, speaking of Edmund Petyo, campus courier. “And the grounds crew actually helped us out that day by delivering all of those packages in a truck for us, so we didn’t have to make several trips in our van to do that.”

The way packages are processed is fairly simple. Packages come through via FedEx or UPS and are delivered to the mailroom. The packages are then scanned into the post office’s computer system and student recipients are notified of their package delivery.

Martin works at the front window to disperse packages to students while Petyo delivers packages to staff and faculty.

Martin said student employees are a necessity to the workings of Misericordia’s mailroom.

“How does that get done? It gets done by myself and our three student workers,” she said. “We work hard to get it done because there are few of us and there are a lot of packages. We really rely on our three student workers and we heavily rely on them to be here helping.”

Maddy Farrell, Marykate Guerriero and Katlyn Schmidt are student workers in the mailroom. Martin was very appreciative, stating the support from the students is needed and emphasizes the job would be much more difficult without them.

“It’s hard if there’s only one person here because we can’t be receiving packages in from the shippers and also processing the packages and getting the packages out of the front window,” she said.

There are no plans of expansion to the mailroom in the future, even with the rising record of packages being delivered. Martin, however, did comment on the growth of packages.

“If every year keeps increasing as this (year) did, we’d obviously have to do something,” she said. Martin has always dreamt that, in the future, there could be a larger window to help multiple package recipients and people dropping off mail, but there are no plans in place to make that happen.

“This year has been really good,” she said. “We have really good systems and we’ve seen our turnaround time is pretty quick. Students are really quick to pick up their packages, and we’re able to process them quickly, so I think we’re well equipped to handle that. But that’s my wish that we can get a bigger counter – a bigger window area through which we can serve.”

The mailroom will continue to deliver packages and newspapers to The Highlander office to be dispersed for the foreseeable future. But for now, Martin and the others will relish in the new record.

“We did it! Yup, we did it!” she exclaimed.