Annie Wu

Participating in the Community Service Project has helped me become more comfortable with talking to faculty members and my peers. When my group was in the process of finding an organization to volunteer for, we had to make several calls to different vice presidents, executive board members, and other authoritative figures in order to find a place that fit into our schedules and encompassed our interests. Additionally, we had to speak to each other and meet up often in order to determine how our presentation would come together in the end and how each of us would fulfill different roles in the group effort.

I have visited the writing center once this semester. The mentors there were very welcoming and friendly, and I felt comfortable having discussions with them about the ways I could improve my writing. Additionally, I actively participated in the Conversation Partners Program and had a wonderful experience as a member. I became friends with an international graduate student with whom I would have otherwise never crossed paths, and she introduced me to several of her friends as well. I learned a great deal about the culture in her hometown in Northern China, and I told her anecdotes about my experiences as a born-and-raised New Yorker.

Going to the writing center definitely helped me improve as a writer, which has in turn given me a bit of an edge in my current English course. Additionally, since writing is a critical component of most courses, I have been able to improve in my other writing-intensive classes as well, such as Law and Speech Communications. This gradual progress in one area will certainly serve as a stepping stone for future success in others, in the coming years.

The Community Service Project has allowed me to see our Baruch community from a different perspective. Coming into this school, I regarded it as merely a place for learning. While it still is, first and foremost, an academic institution, it is also a mentally-enriching community filled with young adults who are striving to better themselves in many different ways. Baruch is a place for us students to gather together, share interests, and discover different paths, but it is also a place for us leave our marks on and one to make better.

In the next three years, I still see myself exploring different career paths and interests. I hope to experiment for at least another year before fully committing to one area of study. I also hope to branch out and engage myself in different clubs and organizations, where I can meet more people from different walks of life.

Serving my community means giving without being asked to give. It means working towards a more fair society by helping those who are struggling, or at a disadvantage, so that they can gain an equal chance to others at find opportunity, happiness, and success. Distributing meals in a soup kitchen allows people who are struggling financially to worry less about finding a way to feed themselves and to focus more on their other necessities. Tutoring 3rd graders who are falling behind in math or English class helps them catch up to their peers and level out the playing field in competitive schools.

As a Baruch scholar, I should devote time and effort to improving Baruch College as a whole. This could mean volunteering at fundraising programs or spreading awareness about events that would allow the students to do good for others, such as blood drives or toy drives. The service requirement in our honors program encourages us to become more involved in our local communities and, because of this, it is very likely that we will continue to lend a helping hand to those who are in need during our school breaks and our free time.

Volunteering doesn’t only help the people that we are serving– it also helps us mature and become more aware of the difficulties that other people face. Many of us are fortunate enough to have supportive families, food, and shelter. By giving back to our community, we are acknowledging the social issues all around us, and hopefully this will motivate us to create solutions for them.

In the beginning of my freshman year of high school, I had no sense of direction. I had questionable priorities and lacked long-term goals. Getting enough sleep and spending time with the new friends that I’d made were the most important things on my mind and I cruised through the first semester carelessly. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my academics, but rather that I felt like I had all the time in the world to adapt to high school.

At the same time, I had just made it onto my school’s swim team. It was a sudden transition from swimming recreationally to pumping out hundreds of laps everyday, but I loved it. At every practice, I challenged myself to push harder than the day before; at every competition, I had an overwhelming need to swim a personal best time. While my school grades trembled early on, I held steady in my desire to become faster in the water. Once the first season ended, I realized that I needed other goals to accomplish. So, I transferred my focus to schoolwork. As the years progressed, I became a far more diligent student and I improved greatly in the pool. Swimming kept me grounded and I really think that it saved me from what could have been an academic downspiral.

Yet while I’ve learned to discipline myself both academically and athletically, I’ve also become more stressed over the years. Of course I expect to become a better-informed and more knowledgeable person as I continue through college, and I hope that I’ll quickly find that one subject or class that I love and choose to pursue—but I’m still concerned that, at the end of this semester, I’ll remain completely unsure of what I want to do in the future. I have more responsibilities now than just schoolwork and swimming, and I’m scared that I’ll never be able to find the perfect balance between all the things going on in my life. And while I hope to settle into a solid daily routine, I don’t want school to become tedious. I remember the weeks in high school when I felt completely run down, and I want to do everything I can to avoid that feeling during my next four years in college.