Visit on December 5 4-5PM – Make up for Service Scholars Orientation and Training because I joined Service Scholars late

Normally I help students in the library but today I had to help students in the gym and helped them organize and play games. I wasn’t involved in too much teaching but it was fun seeing a lot of children that I normally teach, in a different aspect. Students I normally teach were playing dodgeball and ping pong, and it was very interesting to watch. Many 0f them were much goofier, and more excited when playing in the gym, mostly because they didn’t have any work to do. Along with this, I saw many students and how talented they were at different games.

By seeing many of the children in a non studious environment, it reminded me of how adults often have talents that don’t go seen. Often at times we forget how talented we are in various aspects of life and we choose to forget how important those talents are. We are often just in the work/study mindset and seem to forget how good we are at other aspects of life. We could be good at sports, music or anything else, but we need to remind ourselves how important it is to remember those traits.

At first I was unsure of how we would be assisting the animal shelter in taking care of cats for two hours every other week. The amount of time that we spent at the shelter seemed like it wouldn’t be enough to do anything substantial.

However, after finishing the orientation and training, I’m quite looking forward to going every other Tuesday. Essentially, we serve as “Feline Friends”, and our job is to interact with the cats in the shelter so that they can become more used to being around people. This will ultimately help them become adopted and go to permanent homes.

During the training, we went through procedures for our visits. Nothing stuck out too much, except the heavy use of hand sanitizer. I’m very much looking forward to coming back!

I was excited to volunteer at the SPCA after the orientation and training sessions at the beginning of the semester. The staff was very friendly, welcoming and informative. They provided us with a lot of helpful information, including a volunteer manual with their mission statement and all kinds of great details about the SPCA, including adopting guidelines. I have to say I would have been very tempted to try to adopt one of the older dogs there if we were allowed to have them in our dorm rooms.  Their dedication to the animals is truly inspiring.

I attended the orientation to the Certificate in Engaged Leadership to learn more about the program. The program allows students to apply for grants to provide community service to organizations they are passionate about. In their presentation, the presenters brought up an important point that made me reflect my own community service, that people often do community service for the sake of community service, rather than participating because they feel passionate about the organization’s mission. By participating in Engaged Leadership, this will really allow students who are interested in community service to hone in on which organizations they want to provide their service to and how they are going to provide such service.

Another point the presenters brought up that caught my attention is that many of the activities/clubs students participate mainly happen on-campus. However, by joining Engaged Leadership, this allows students to connect with organizations not located in the Cornell campus. This point reminded me of how important it is to remember that there are many organizations beyond Cornell’s campus (i.e. other parts of Ithaca) that need help as well. It is easy to think about events that are happening on the Cornell campus, but forget about the world outside of Cornell. I find myself easily caught up in school work that I do not realize/care to look up news and events happening around the world.  Moving forward, I will try to be more involved in not only on campus, but also the greater Ithaca community.

Solzhenitsyn once said that “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.” Initially, I had always thought that hastiness and superficiality are ideas that are entirely separate from the everyday activities we engage in; however, I am now realizing that often times these very ideologies can define what each and every one of us gains from the experiences we engage in.

Our community engagement session was led by Julio who presented the scenario of a young girl who went all the way to Africa in order to get Instagram likes. Not only did she blatantly disrespect all of the communities she interacted with, but she also seemed to only care about the few pictures she wanted to take while largely ignoring the rich culture around her. Social media, like most things, serves many useful purposes and has many adverse effects as well. Where it has allowed a countless number of people to seamlessly connect with one another, it has also pushed others to maintain a superficial image, a charade so to speak of the person they want others to perceive them to be. This made me realize that two people given the same exact opportunities and experiences do not necessarily gain the same things- more specifically this highlighted how important our priorities and mindset can be, as most of the time the only things we really gain from an experience are the ones we seek. 

For my service training event, I attended the Connecting Identity to Community-Call 2 Action workshop. I have gone to previous Public Service Center events and I always find them very insightful and engaging. This one particularly allowed us to share our reasons for wanting to help in the community and reflecting in our identities and how that takes into play when doing our service work. I think it is important to consider that we are not all the same and we all have different priorities for which identities matter more to us. I thought this was very useful especially when working with children at the elementary school from different background and making sure to not generalize my family experiences with theirs. This is specially important to do in the service work I have been doing, since a school is supposed to be a safe place for these children.

A few weeks ago, I attended a workshop on facilitating critical reflection for my orientation requirement for Rose Service Scholars. Going in, I did not understand the amount of thought and effort that goes into being a quality facilitator. However, through a series of points by Mike Bishop, I soon realized that this is really something that needs tremendous amount of work to be successful at. For example, there was a purpose to everything Mike did. When he asked a question, he paused and noted that you should wait about 15 seconds and allow for “dead airtime” until people feel comfortable to speak up. In addition, a great way to build group engagement is to deflect questions to others. It is highly recommended to ask more open-ended questions than close-ended ones in order to allow for more discussion.

Among other things, these are some points that stood out to me. I look to really build this level of consideration into the ways I facilitate group discussions in the future. Ultimately, this will allow all participants to feel included and would allow for more effective group discussions.

As a service scholar for BJM, our orientation was to attend a panel.

At first, I was disappointed because it had nothing to do with the type of service that I was doing, but I realized that I was wrong and I learned a lot from it.

The panel had 4 different speakers who introduced themselves not by their position but by what their communities are. The one that stood out the most to me was the person who was part of a program that sent books to prisoners and created a publication composed of works written by the prisoners who are part of the program. This is because it just started off as a small favor of sending books to a few prisoners, but then it became a larger program and even a publication. It connected people from different places and helped them know that they are not going through their journey alone.

There were a couple of things I took away most from this workshop and wrote down. The first was to really listen to others because you may never know what you find. I say this because that was how the prison program started. The panelist had listened and paid attention to the man he had sent books to in prison and now there is a program for those who love to read but do not have the access. The second was step out of your comfort zone because you never know what you may find, especially if it is for something you are passionate about. Another panelist was working with a group that she could not personally identify with, but found ways to make it work and be respectful towards the group because she was passionate about it and believed she could help. The third and final thing I took away was no matter how long or short you are helping an organization or participating in a service, you are still making a change.

As a service scholar, I volunteer periodically at the Beverly J. Elementary school where I tutor fourth and fifth graders on their homework. As part of my commitment to being a service scholar, I was to complete a mandatory orientation session that would prepare me to work with these young students. However, my orientation session was unexpectedly canceled. Luckily, I was a member of REACH in the past, a club that also is dedicated to volunteering at the local Ithaca schools. I also had to take a training session for this club, and Jeff was kind enough to let me blog about that experience.

For REACH, my training was all about how to deal with kids and the course specified rules around the volunteer work that we would be doing. For instance, it discussed how we aren’t to be alone with a student while volunteering, and that we are to report to school faculty if we are unable to manage any poor behavior or if we think a child is acting dangerously. Of course, as I’ve been already volunteering at the elementary school, such behavior has not become an issue for me and all of the students have been delightful to tutor. Much of the information offered by the orientation session seemed much like common sense, but it was good to get some insight into the type of work I’d be doing at the schools before beginning volunteer work.

Last week I attended a panel, where in which the panelists were members of the greater Tompkins county community. While being a member of the Tompkins community, they were also members of various other communities. From social justice, to mindfulness and yoga, the panelists had a variety interests and engagements.

The discussion started off with an introduction to the panelists not by their titles, but by their place in the communities they serve/are a part of. It forced us as observes to view them not as an authority but rather as a member of a community.

They discussed how the entered into their communities, their current roles and their reasons why they love being involved. It encouraged me to branch out, and participate in communities different than my own. Additionally, it caused me to me curious about becoming more involved in the Tompkins county throughout my next 2 years at Cornell. It furthers my desire to pursue a career in public health and medicine where  I will not only be a part of the medical community but I will also be a part of the community that I serve as a doctor.

Last Thursday, I attended a “Be the Change” pre-engagement workshop through Engaged Cornell as a Training session for Rose Service Scholars. There were two specific parts of the workshop that stood out, one being an article we read called “Helping, Fixing, or Serving?” and the other being a satirical video of a young woman who goes to “Africa” to “help” for social media purposes. Both elements were riveting in their own sense, the article resonating deeply with me as an individual and the video disturbing me as a fellow human being.

The article made a distinction between “helping” a community or trying to “fix” their problems as an outsider (in a superior standing) and “serving” that community as a fellow human being (in an equal standing). Many times, we make the mistake of assuming that a certain community needs our help and rather than initiating conversations and asking said community what their needs are, how they would like to be helped, what role they would like us take, we insert ourselves with authority in said community and enforce what we think needs to be done and address the needs we perceive as important. It’s not something that we necessarily do with ill intentions or with our hearts in the wrong place, we just haven’t been taught, haven’t learned to serve others in this way rather than help and fix them the way we deem correct. By serving, we recognize others as fellow humans and recognize the work we are doing as a gift, to them and ourselves. We create human connection and serve each other in humility, rather than fulfilling some sort of charitable quota under a philanthropic or humanitarian pretense (not that there’s anything wrong with such endeavors, but the intention and action need to come from more than perhaps a mere sense of duty or obligation).

The video emphasized this as it showed a young woman, who with the wrong intentions, headed to the “real” Africa (apparently the entire continent), where poverty and sickness was displayed everywhere she looked. She took a plethora of photos, handed out candy, and “helped” out in a school and hospital. So many things were wrong with the video that it was difficult to muster up enough effort to even talk about how awful it was. She went to “help” a community (a whole continent) with stereotypical pretenses, did not make an effort to engage with said community and ask what it was exactly that they needed, she took pictures at highly inappropriate times, was inconsiderate of all those in need around her, was ignorant in what she posted and how she captioned it, and wrongfully fed supposedly starving children candy bars. Not once did we see her spend time with, bond, or form a personal connection with anyone on her trip. Not only did she hurt the community by her “help,” but she violated the community as a whole by intruding into their space without being asked (or even without asking herself). She did not come to humbly engage with or to serve the community, but to impose her “goodwill” and “charity” upon them, since they “obviously needed” it and she was “in the power” to “grant” it.

We need to remember that we are on equal standing when we are serving a community that is not our own– our aim is not to do what we would like or think is correct, but to honor what said community has shared (their needs and wants) during our engaging with them as fellow human beings. Serving others can be a wonderful opportunity for creating personal connections as well as a time that can bring the community and ourselves fulfillment. I count it a grand blessing to return to serve BJM with a mindset that has been refreshed and renewed by these crucial elements of Community Engagement.

I came in the middle of the Pre-engagement workshop in Kennedy Hall 3rd floor, so I missed the video that was shown at the beginning of the workshop. My friend Julio led the workshop, and he asked people’s opinions about the two categories he wrote on the board. I was bewildered about why the video was seen as cheesy and superficial. When Julio asked us to talk to the person next to us and share what we learned, I asked my friend Seher to explain what the other people talked about during the group setting. She told me that the video was about a girl who went to Africa to get Instagram likes. I understood that the message of the video was that external desires should not take priority over the act of service because providing help and leaving smiles on people’s faces must come from the heart. Julio described how two people can do the same community service but have two different reflections. I interpreted this as no two people can take away the same feelings and thoughts from a service they both were involved in because they have different views of what they thought was important. While discussing with my friend Seher, I learned that providing service to an organization also had its limits because too much involvement can be overbearing and crossing the boundary. I agreed with her because a long-term service commitment can establish a meaningful connection with the organization, but the organization may feel burdened if the volunteers were too involved instead of making a lasting contribution. 

On Thursday, I had a Engaged Cornell Dinner I felt so refreshed and rejuvenated. Despite having read Rachel Naomi Rechen’s “Helping, Fixing, and Serving” article before, the words jumped out and touched my heart in a new way. As I am continuing on my years at Cornell, becoming more involved in many things, it is SO important to remember why I am involved. Here are some things that I reflected upon:

• It can feel draining to feel like you’re pulled in so many directions. However, remember that your goal is to serve and not help or fix. You are entering this community without assumptions and without the power dynamic that you are a “superior” Cornell student here to make their lives better. This way, unity is emphasized and there is mutual benefit from the relationship. No feeling drained because you are “helping” or “fixing”. Instead, be motivated that you get to be a part of these people’s (or this person’s) journey,
• I felt saddened that I was learning about all the injustices of the world but couldn’t make a huge impact. In a discussion, my partner mentioned that he likes to think that even making a difference in one person’s life is significant. That uplifted me. In a lot of the things I am involved in, I work one-on-one or in smaller groups with people. I hope that in the same way that I can make an impact through as a Rose Service Scholar.

Ever since getting a family dog two summers ago and being able to spend time with her when I am home during the summer, experiencing homesickness while I am at school has become more common. When I found out that Rose Scholars was offering the opportunity to volunteer at SPCA, I thought that this would be a great chance to interact with animals while at school and placate my longing to be home with my dog while also providing a companion to the shelter animals.

When my family and I went to the shelter to adopt a dog, volunteers had helped us select a compatible fit by informing us about the personality of the dogs there. The care shown by the volunteers and staff for the animals really sold us on adopting.

After attending orientation and training, I was reminded of the significance of the role that volunteers serve in caring for the animals and interacting with the public. This made me very excited to volunteer with the cats. Although I am more used to dogs, I look forward to developing relationships with the cats at the shelter in future volunteering sessions.

Although this workshop was intended for Cornell Certificate in Leadership, it helped the students in the workshop to look at the identities they identified most with, least with and the ones that were the most important.

What I took away from this workshop were the identities that I had forgotten I identified with and further looked at how my identities have changed from high school to college.For example, when I played sports in high school, I identified as a student-athlete, but I have not continued this into college. Overall, I think it was a nice reminder of things that are important to myself.

I felt prepared returning to Cornell for my sophomore year. I’d already dealt with the homesickness, occasional loneliness, and academic adjustment of freshman year. I was excited to be in classes more closely related to my major and to spend time with my friends.

Because I felt I knew what to expect, the workload this semester essentially slapped me in the face. Repeatedly. I’ve felt I have to work in every spare moment just to keep afloat, and have far less time for friends, exercise, and even just relaxing than last year. For the most part, I’m enjoying the work. But my mind doesn’t shut off anymore. Even when I’m taking a break, my mind is buzzing with to-do lists. I created a great little toolbox to deal with stress last year, but suddenly my screwdrivers needed to be replaced by power drills.

This is exactly why I am so excited to be volunteering at the SPCA. I, like most people, find a great amount of comfort in animals. A pet in a dorm, however, is not feasible. The opportunity to spend every other Tuesday evening helping to socialize and mentally stimulate dozens of cats feels like some type of divine intervention, or at the very least a  symbiotic relationship.

Orientation and training at the SPCA over the last two weeks felt like the first step toward something wonderful.