College Survival Guide
Angela Perkey of studentsserve.org
Photo: ericengland.net
Chances are, model citizens of the collegiate world, you’ve never been sentenced to such filthy drudgery, but you’ve probably joined the droves of embittered who have waded through the proverbial shit that is community service. You picked up trash or lugged around boxes of creamed corn at a food drive, all in the name of becoming one of the desirables, a college applicant-turned-faux-humanitarian.
That was then. Now, you’re already in college. And you’ve successfully duped that stuffy admissions board into thinking that you, with all of your brushing of granny’s hair at the retirement home and reading to 5-year-olds, are a good person.
But once inside the insular, ivy-laced walls of academia, you soon will find that you’ve received the golden gift: four-plus years of navel gazing. A smorgasbord of selfishness with opportunities to squander mom and dad’s monthly infusions into your bank account, your financial aid money and that birthday check from grandma to fund more experimental cocktails of alcohol/drugs/sex than you ever thought possible.
Inevitably, the guilt from nearly a half-decade of said experimentation will set in, and you may long for atonement. Amid all the late nights and debauchery, you may be looking for (dare we say it?) something more.
Enter Students Serve (www.studentsserve.org), an organization designed to give civic-minded students the opportunity to do some good on their own terms. And, yes, of their own free will. We know what you’re thinking: self-imposed volunteer work is a little drastic. Judges across the country use community service to punish criminals for a reason. But there are people out there—your peers, nonetheless—who swear it will change your life.
Take Nashville-born Angela Perkey. (Yes, that’s pronounced “perky.”) Now a senior at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, Perkey once punched the clock at a nursing home, painting toenails and pushing wheelchairs to pay her volunteer dues. But all that geriatric grunt work wasn’t entirely satisfying. “It wasn’t using any of my talents or skills, so I felt that my time...wasn’t being used in the best way possible,” she says.
She’s putting it nicely. Under her cute-as-cupcakes demeanor, she realizes one sad truth: a Saturday afternoon spent sponge bathing someone else’s granny at the nursing home is much like sponge bathing a grandmother of your very own—noble but uninspiring.
So Perkey wanted to change the face of such philanthropic flogging. Last year, at the ripe age of 19, she started Students Serve, a student-run organization designed to give innovative college students the dough to create and execute their own community service programs.
Fresh off of a community service project she completed as part of her college coursework, Perkey wanted to share the love. After the federal government had threatened to decrease funding to Virginia health clinics that were not adequately serving patients of diverse backgrounds, Perkey and her classmates worked to create a manual to teach doctors how to better communicate with these patients—and keep their funding.
Inspired by the experience, Perkey decided to give fellow students across the country the same chance to change their cities. “We provide opportunities for students to use what they’re learning in their classes—what they’re really interested in—and help them combine those with service opportunities so that they are doing well-informed service that is fulfilling to them,” she says.
Sure, it’s reminiscent of the kind of talk you’d hear in the interview portion of a beauty pageant, but once you get beyond all that “I just want to save the world” fluff—and all of your disdain of such do-goodery—you’ll see an opportunity to do something of substance.
It works like this. Say, for instance, you’re an engineering major with a humanitarian streak and a lack of practical work experience. You may want to spend a summer helping with the New Orleans rebuilding effort, designing homes and schools that are better equipped to handle a hurricane season. With grants ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, Students Serve has the money to make it happen.
And you don’t even have to be a stellar student. Your GPA doesn’t mean a thing in the Students Serve application process. Perkey says her team is looking for students who “might have these great ideas but don’t necessarily have the great grades to back them up.”
Still, this isn’t some get-rich scheme. Once Students Serve cuts the check, you better be prepared to follow through. They’ve got an arsenal of reporting requirements (think evaluation forms, numerical data and blogs) to mark your progress—and a whole legal team to make sure the grant doesn’t fund your trek to some spring break beer-bong Mecca.
We’ll understand if this seems like more extracurricular work than you’re willing to put in. Just remember this: we’d never knock your noble attempts to master the keg stand, but one day you presumably will graduate.
When that day comes, you’ll find that the delicious waters of the free money well (scholarships, financial aid, sympathy checks from your parents) quickly run dry, and you’ll actually have to get a job. And employers like self-starters—not to mention the kind of people who are willing to work for next to nothing, which is actually only a slight upgrade from what you’d be making for all this sans-pay community service work. See? You’ll be better prepared already.
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