As Columbia students, we are seeking an education. As young people, we are straddling the blurry and often frustrating division between independent adults and naïve youth. Like Jack Kerouac in On the Road, we struggle to find ourselves while enjoying the mayhem and spontaneity of growing up. In serious professional settings, however, we still feel out-of-place and inexperienced. There is only one field where we are allowed to play with the big hitters—it is a place where our absurd idealism and fiery determination to prove ourselves merge perfectly, and although it sounds so simple, the issue of service is one that pertains personally and professionally to every student on campus.
Many of us imagine ourselves as head honchos or medical bigwigs who direct a team of local staff and hold the fate of a company or a life in our hands. Others view themselves as philanthropic vagabonds who sing several languages and interact with locals. How, we ask ourselves, are we going to reach that vision? In Community Impact, we work in teams to organize our club activities, recruit members, and answer to our parent organization and financiers. As leaders, we are part sales, public relations, secretary, and treasury. We often engineer ways to improve communication and content. If the boss is not pleased, your club might literally be terminated, and if they want you to do better, you could be put on probation. In organized service, we are accountable to parent organizations as well as the public we serve, and although our Art Humanities class will help us learn the difference between Rembrandt and Picasso, no formal education can prepare us for the pressure and reward of heading our own service opportunities.
Through Health Education Awareness League (HEAL), I teach health to a class of seventh graders with wild imaginations. As soon as I get home, I crash. It is exhausting to grab and hold the attention of 30 12-year-olds. Planning and coordinating each little aspect of the presentation can feel like composing a symphony in less than one hour. Whenever I visit my class, I wonder if I was as curious and intuitive during my seventh grade. I flash back to my Winnie the Pooh shirt that I religiously wore until ninth grade, and something tells me that these kids been given the opportunity to receive education that I never received. I get that warm and fuzzy feeling that makes me roll my eyes whenever I hear about it from anyone else.
Volunteering has also brought me closer to the people in my community, through hearing their stories. I once saw a movie in which Merlin is a feeble old wizard and tells his legendary tales of King Arthur and his court in public for change from passers-by. I wanted to be in his audience and relive the myths of honor, war, and love. I am still captivated by stories, and luckily, I have many people who are eager to share theirs with me. I used to visit an elderly, housebound friend named Hope. For hours, I would listen to her reminisce about old New York. We would watch classic movies, and she would turn to me and share how she once saw Katharine Hepburn perform on stage or how Lauren Bacall was very pleasant. Now, I tutor a Thai immigrant named Plaiwan, and I structure our lessons so that she begins each week by writing a paragraph on her life. I tell her that this assignment will help her writing skills, but what I am really interested in is unraveling her story.
Education and isolation are like oil and water. It is impossible to receive a complete and rewarding education without first-hand experience in the real world. In our gated campus on our quiet Morningside Heights community, it is easy to forget that there is another world surrounding us. In this foreign domain, people hunch their backs in shame as they walk toward their local food shelter with their children trailing them. In this alien planet, community members wait for hours in Medicaid lines for assistance so that they can afford their weekly insulin. Indeed, it is a strange place outside our Ivy League bubble, but we must venture out and force ourselves to interact with the disadvantaged, unkempt, crazy, and has-beens because most of the time, we discover that we have much to learn from them. Otherwise, we can never say that we have actually lived in the city.
The author is a junior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is a coordinator for the Health Awareness Education League.