Introduction
“What did you do this weekend?” Britt asks as you walk into Professor Schmidt’s 8 a.m. class. Smiling, you grab a seat in the third row and shuffle papers from your bag.
“Oh, you know,” you stammer, “nothing much.” Nothing much. Nothing much?
Do you ever feel as though life is just passing you by? Are you caught in the daily grind of work and school, wondering at the end of the weekend where the time has gone and what you have to show for it?
A successful college experience is about more than academic achievement. Your college years— whether you are young or old—can be a time of immense personal enrichment.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time? Do you have any hobbies? Many colleges and universities offer clubs and student organizations to fit a variety of interests. Whether you are interested in team activities or solo ventures, school is a great place to find out about opportunities to network and connect with people who enjoy similar things.
Your academic journey can also provide opportunities for volunteering in your local community and even the chance to turn those hours into course credits through Service Learning. By using your time as a student to participate in activities outside of the classroom, you’ll explore new possibilities and make valuable connections in the process.
In this lesson, you’ll learn about some of the many opportunities for extracurricular involvement— both on and off campus—as a college student. Let’s examine ways you can use the resources and connections of your campus to find new ways to connect and engage with your community.
Extracurricular Activities: Reap the Benefits
As you enter higher education, you may find that you are busier than you’ve ever been before. Often, that’s due to the variety of extracurricular activities available to you: athletics, fraternities and sororities, student newspapers and literary journals, debate teams, study groups, service learning or volunteer projects, internships, mentorships, student government, and political action groups, to name just a few. Your school might also offer free admissions or discounted tickets to conferences, films, plays, concerts, comedy shows, museums, games or sporting events, art galleries, and speaking engagements. Student organizations help to make these activities possible, and you can join any of them.
People who participate in extracurricular activities gain many benefits. They bridge the worlds inside and outside the classroom. They expand their learning styles by testing theories in action and gaining concrete experiences. Through student organizations, they explore possible careers, make contacts for jobs, and build a lifelong habit of giving back to their communities. They make new friends among both students and faculty and work on teams composed of people from different cultures.
Getting involved in such organizations also comes with some risks. When students don’t balance extracurricular activities with class work, their success in school can suffer. They can also compromise their health by losing sleep, neglecting exercise, skipping meals, or relying on fast food. These costs are easier to avoid if you keep a few suggestions in mind:
Make conscious choices about how to divide your time between schoolwork and extracurricular activities. Decide up front how many hours each week or month you can devote to a student organization. Leave room in your schedule for relaxing and for unplanned events.
Look to the future when making commitments. Write down three or four of the most important goals you’d like to achieve in your lifetime. Then, choose extracurricular activities that directly support those goals.
Create a career plan that includes a list of skills needed for your next job. Choose extracurricular activities that will help you develop those necessary skills. If you’re unsure of your career choice, then get involved in campus organizations to explore your options.
Whenever possible, develop leadership experience by holding an office in an organization.
If that’s too much of a commitment, then volunteer to lead a committee or plan a special event.
Get involved in a variety of extracurricular activities. Varying your activities demonstrates to future employers that you can work with a diverse group of people in a range of settings.
Recognize your own reluctance to follow through on a commitment. You might agree to attend meetings and find yourself forgetting them or consistently showing up late. If that happens, write a Discovery Statement about the way you’re using time. Follow that with an Intention Statement about ways to keep your agreements—or consider renegotiating those agreements.
Say no to activities that fail to create value for you. Avoid joining groups only because you feel obligated to do so or feel guilty for not doing so.
Check out the rules before joining any student organization. Ask about dues and attendance requirements.
What Is Service Learning?
As part of a service learning project for a sociology course, students volunteer at a community center for older adults. For another service learning project, history students interview people in veterans’ hospitals about their war experiences. These students share their interview results with a psychiatrist on the hospital staff.
Meanwhile, business students provide free tax-preparation help at a center for low-income people. Students in graphic arts classes create free promotional materials for charities. Other students staff a food cooperative and a community credit union.
These examples of actual projects from the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse demonstrate the basic premise of service learning: Volunteer work and other forms of service can be a vehicle for higher education.
Think of service learning as a way to find new tools and new ideas. In fact, see service learning as a tool based on one of the core values behind this course—making a positive contribution to the lives of other people.
Many of the resources in this course are about filling yourself up, taking care of yourself, being “selfish,” and meeting your needs. The strategies and tips suggested here focus on how to get what you want out of school, work, and the rest of your life. One result of these lessons in successful selfishness is your immense capacity to contribute. This means giving back to your community in ways that enhance the lives of other people.
Many schools offer service learning programs. Look up service learning in the index of your school catalog or search your school’s website using those key words. There might be a service learning office on your campus.
When you design a service learning project, consider the following suggestions:
Follow your interests. Think of the persistent problems in the world—illiteracy, hunger, poverty, racial and gender inequality, addiction, climate change, corruption and abuse of power, to name just a few. Which of them generate the strongest feelings in you? Which of them link to your possible career plans and choice of major? The place where passion intersects with plan (see the six levels of powerful speaking discussed in an earlier module) often creates an opportunity for service learning.
Choose your community partner carefully. Work with a community organization that has experience with students. Make sure that the organization has liability insurance to cover volunteers.
Learn about your community partner. Once you connect with a community organization, learn everything you can about it. Find its mission statement and explore its history. Find out what makes this organization unique. If the organization partners with other entities in the community, learn about them as well.
Handle logistics. Integrating service learning into your schedule calls for detailed planning. If your volunteer work takes place off campus, arrange for transportation and allow for travel time.
Build long-term support for the project. One potential pitfall of service learning is that the programs are often short-lived. After students pack up and return to campus, the programs can deteriorate and die because of lack of staffing and support. To prevent this outcome, recruit other students or community members willing to step in and take over for you when the semester ends.
Connect service learning to critical thinking. To think critically and creatively about your service learning project, ask questions such as these:
- What service did you perform?
- What roles did your service project include, and who filled those roles?
- What knowledge and skills did you bring to this project?
- After being involved in this project, what new knowledge and skills did you gain?
- What did you learn from this experience that can help another service learning project succeed?
- Will this project affect your choice of a major? If so, how?
- Will this project affect your career plans? If so, how?
Service learning provides an opportunity to combine theory and practice, reflection and action, book learning and real-world experience. Education takes place as we reflect on our experiences and turn them into new insights and intentions. Use service learning as a way to elevate your thinking skills to the critical level.
