I always knew that I liked helping people, but I didn’t realize how much every service-based task and interaction helped me.  I have been involved with global service projects, service to the community, and service to the college.  I worked on 1-day events and multi-year projects.  I organized and participated.  I had events with tangible outputs and projects with questionable outcomes.  Yet, when all of these dimensions of service were held in balance throughout my time at Olin, they all returned an incredible amount of insight about the world and my role within it.

My early service at Olin was focused on the college.  As a first-year student, my perceptions of Olin were based heavily on the things that the admissions department pitches.  None of it was inaccurate, as Olin is full of projects, self-motivated learning, and exciting clubs, but they don’t put much emphasis on the boring, tedious classes that don’t fit that mold.  Olin was also an empowering place – if you don’t like things, change it!  As a result, I was very active in the strategic planning process for the college, very involved in gathering class feedback for professors, and spent a lot of time around small improvement initiatives on campus.  I also was very involved with improving the student experience around entrepreneurship, especially with the student business incubator program, the Foundry.  This started to broaden later in my sophomore year to include more off-campus teaching-related service, but overall, most of service time during my first two years at Olin focused on the college itself.

Though I didn’t mean for it to happen at the time, service to the college taught me an enormous amount about how to get things done in the organization.  I met a large part of the staff in trying to change policies or carry out small projects.  I learned how to give feedback in a clear, timely, and respectful way.  I found other people who shared similar passions and worked with them on projects.  Service turned out to be a means to deep engagement in the college community, a community that has paid me back a hundred fold with opportunities and challenges that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.  One of those opportunities, being an R2 (residence resource/student counselor), put me in a formal role to continue to directly help others struggling in a variety of ways within the community.

At the end of my sophomore year, my short weekly commitment to help with a new remedial math program provided me an opportunity to actually teach.  At a high level, I was convinced that I wanted to be a leader in some form of educational change, but I had no idea how that would actually happen.  Unlike a job, community service let me try things out in a low-pressure, low-commitment environment.

Near the end of my year away from Olin, I recognized external service as a huge missing part of my college experience.  I felt that community service at Olin, at least in the past, was not very relevant to Olin students.  In order to commit myself to a role that would excite me, I signed up as the communications lead on the Olin SERV board.  Though I never figured out how to fully transform the image others held about SERV, I gained a much better understanding of the difficulties involved in presenting service opportunities to Olin students.  Through service, my frustration was turned into empathy and an ongoing commitment to improve things.

The funding for the STEM program dried up by the spring of my junior year, and along with it, my 5 hours of preparing curriculum and 3 hours of teaching every week.  By the end of the year, I was reconnecting with the Engineering Discovery (eDiscovery) group to get back into teaching.  Most of my service during my senior year has come through eDiscovery weekend workshops and a weekly commitment to co-teach science in a 6^th grade classroom in Boston.  Not only are these opportunities directly related to my passions, but like many service opportunities, I could immediately get started without qualifications.  Instead of thinking of my recent teaching as service to a 6^th grade classroom, I can approach this time as an educational experimentation area with 20+ free volunteers.  On top of that, these volunteers are inner-city 6^th graders, a group I would never have access to as a suburban college engineering student.

Community service was always an outlet for helping others.  As my passions began to find more direction at Olin, service became a place to try out new things, get a closer look at the problems I cared about, and empathize with the people who do similar work on a full-time basis.  I learned more about what I liked and didn’t like doing, but I also acquired unexpected skills and perspectives that I wasn’t even looking for.  I’ve also met many friends at Olin through this outlet for shared passions, especially around education.