Jeffrey Chan

Even though I was already proactive about extracurriculars before this project, this huge effort and push for community service awareness opened my eyes like never before. I saw new opportunities to participate in the Baruch community sphere and was able to join new organizations such as Sigma Alpha Delta and USG. While this project was forced upon us, it did not feel like it during the process. I felt like I had a stake in the project and a responsibility to see it through as well as make it successful. It allows us to interact with members of our learning community that we don’t normally speak or hang out with on a day to day basis. This project’s potential success can make us all come together more and make us happier as a learning community as well as a community inside Baruch.

Serving your community can mean anything from picking up trash on your way home from school to helping tutor kids attending underserved and underfunded schools. It means being able to affect the lives of the people living in your community in some way, no matter how small the deed is. I see my role in Baruch as a zig zagging forest of thorns that I have to somehow jockey my way through ultimately leading to a fire axe. That fire axe is a symbol of a position of influence within Baruch. A position that can cleave its way through the problems of the community and the school. Quite an analogy eh? With great power, comes great responsibility. – Ben Parker. As a newly minted Baruch Scholar, I have been endowed with the tools and privileges that allow me to best service the community as I think best.
I think that the culture of service breeds a sense of being a greater whole and allows us to conceptualize and adapt to greater serve our communities as a whole. It makes us feel like a part of a bigger network and how we by performing some seemingly meaningless service might improve the world around us little by little.

The main molding of the current Jeffrey Chan began in the humble halls of Hunter College High School. Between the lack of windows and therefore, sunlight, and being stuck inside the thick brick walls of the school, I developed a certain caustic manner of speech which stuck with me till the present time. Of course to get into that school, I had to sit for an entrance exam but thats a whole other story that I’m sure I’ll get to blog about sooner or later. My mom’s always been a huge influence on me. In the early days, it used to be about making myself feel happy when the teacher gave me a check plus on a crayon drawing or something. In the older years, that feeling shifted into making Mom happy with my grades so I could step outside the house without getting yelled at about becoming a street hoodlum instead of studying.

Mom also taught me the value of money. It really sucks when you’re getting $10 a week for lunch in manhattan when all your other friends are getting $25 and they ask you all the time why you eat the cafeteria crap by yourself. Basic economics. How to allocate scarce resources. When you have to survive for 5 days on $10, I would say that cash is a pretty scarce resource. When 11:30 (my lunch period) rolled round, I’d carefully count how many wrinkled singles I had left in the back pocket to figure out if I had enough money to treat myself aka buy school lunch but be able to get the 50 cent cookies as dessert.

My expectations as a college student is to succeed. I’m going to try to do everything that I want, to the fullest extent of what I want and if i fall a little short here and there, then thats okay. It just shouldn’t happen more than twice a year. My hopes are that this year will turn out to be an amazing year and that nothing will go wrong. I’m still optimistic.

The only concern I have at the moment is making sure I sleep enough. Speaking of which, I should probably sleep now.

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