Last spring when I was picking classes, I chose My Body My Health – it fit my schedule well, and the course description sounded all right. I went to my first few classes and was blind-sided with a mandatory service requirement.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem giving a helping hand when I can, but “required volunteering?” What is that supposed to mean? Why wasn’t that in the course description? I have so much on my plate as it is, could I handle this too?
I did manage to complete my assignment; I even enjoyed doing it. I would even have done it without the assignment, but being told I need to do something like that just frustrated me. I wanted to help on my own terms, not someone else’s. I was lucky enough to find a project that I could do on my own time – most people in my class weren’t so lucky. They had to miss work, family events, or even other classes.
I like doing community service. In high school I spent a lot of time volunteering for events projects. I did hundreds of hours of community service during high school. I did it because it needed to be done and I chose to do it. I was happy to be there and enjoyed giving back to my community. I did community service for the right reasons. Volunteering is not being forced to stack chairs at some event you don’t even care about. Volunteering is getting involved in a cause because you care about it.
Community service should be done, but it should be done on a volunteer basis. Many students want to help but just can’t spare the eight extra hours to help out. Is two hours of the time worthless? Another handful of students will never want to do community service and will never get anything out of it, nor will they be happy doing it. Do we want these people helping out? They would be unhappy and so would everyone else around them.
As I said, I like volunteering for things. I think it runs in my family. My mom spent two years in Turkey with the Peace Corps. I would love to follow in her footsteps and go somewhere where my help will really make a difference. I’m willing to give up two years of my life to do this, but most people aren’t.
If anyone, including me, was forced to join the peace corps, it would be a disaster. The difference between being forced to live in an underdeveloped country for two years and giving up eight hours of your time to work at a carnival in town is as different as tequila shots and beer, but the end result is the same. Whether it’s two years or eight hours, tequila or beer, it doesn’t matter in the end; people get upset. I would resent whoever made me spend time I hadn’t planned on spending. Two years may be much longer than eight hours, but those eight hours are just as mine to spend as the two years are.
The point of the assignment was to show us students how important it is to get involved and encourage them to want to give back to the community. OK, I accept the reasoning behind the project, but not the execution of it. Forcing people to do community service doesn’t make them more likely to want to do it. It makes them annoyed and less likely to have an open mind and a positive experience. Don’t we want to promote community service to students, not taint their views on it forever?
In my class, many different organizations came and explained their program to the class. We were shown where could find even more places to volunteer for a good cause. I think that having the speakers was a great idea. Hopefully the speakers sparked enough interest to motivate the students to want to know more.
Why not make community service an extra credit opportunity? Reward the people who followed through with their interests and did some good for the area. But don’t punish people who already have overly hectic lives and are just trying to get through school. Don’t just increase the number of people doing community service – work to increase the number of people really volunteering to do community service.
Molly Eggleston is a Collegian staff member.
