Steven Yang

As a freshman in Baruch, it is our duty to take initiative and join clubs and engage in extra curricular activities. Especially as a commuter school, it is extremely hard to make friends and be part of a community without joining clubs. Thankfully, there are various options on campus to choose from. Regardless of an individual’s major, there is a club or organization for anyone. For example, there is Marketers of Baruch (MOB), however they accept people of different majors as well. Furthermore, there are other clubs such as Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) and UCLA. These clubs all offer a sense of a community and make Baruch feel more at home. I personally have attended events hosted by MOB, and have talked to many of the members there.

After completing the community service proposal, I have realized that giving back to the community is extremely important. Although I have not volunteered at the specific organization that my group presented, I have volunteered at a different soup kitchen. I have volunteered at The Father’s Heart Ministries, which is located in Manhattan. Despite receiving a hefty parking ticket of $125, I still left the location feeling very satisfied, knowing that I helped out and gave back to the community. At the location, I helped with resetting the tables. This job entailed interaction with those who came in looking for a hot meal. During my time there, I noticed that there was a large number of Asians, specifically Chinese elderly coming into the place to eat. This really made me see things in a different way, as I saw these people as people who could have been my grandparents. That meant that these people were someone’s grandparents. It made me feel extremely grateful to be able to help out these people, and knowing that they were able to have a hot meal to eat, really made me feel that I gave back to the community. I even spoke to many of the people who came in, in a specific Chinese dialect, and many of them were very surprised. As soon as I started to speak to them, their eyes lit up and there was a smile on their faces. Their reaction to me just simply speaking to them in Chinese, made the experience a memorable one.

Currently, I am not as active in the Baruch community as I would like to be. As of now, I am just a regular student that commutes to and from Baruch College. Although I have attended a few community service events here and there, I would definitely like to be more active and help out more. Back in High School, I attended one or two events throughout the four years. However, I plan on attending a lot more events throughout my college years. Eventually, I would like to be involved with the community and be a part of multiple different clubs such as VSA or UCLA or MOB. As a Baruch Scholar in the Honors Program, we are expected to complete a certain amount of hours of community service each year. I believe that this is extremely important. Giving back to the community, especially one that you were brought up in, is a way of giving back to the place you call home. It is a way of saying thanks to the community that shaped who you are now and led you to where you are now.  The Honors Program promotes a strong emphasis on community service. I believe this helps push Scholars to do what is right; giving back to the community and helping the less fortunate. Furthermore, we receive scholarships that help pay for our tuition. I believe this is another motivating factor to push us to do more community service. Since we do not have to work as much to pay for our tuition, we should definitely invest more time volunteering at different places or attending more community service events.

I believe growing up in Queens, New York has really shaped who I am. As many people know Queens is one of the most diverse places on Earth. Growing up here in Queens has exposed me to a multitude of cultures and people. I remember in elementary school, we would have a multicultural food night, where people of different ethnicities would bring in food that represented them or their culture. Trying these new foods at such a young age definitely shaped who I am today. My parents also contributed to this. Ever since I could remember, my parents always took my sister and I somewhere on summer vacation. Whether it be a trip to China to visit relatives or a cruise to the Caribbean, we were frequent travelers. As my sister and I grew up, we would expand our options and go to other countries such as England, France, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and many others. Wherever we went, we would always try new foods and learn about the culture through food. This has shaped me to who I am as I went from a super picky eater at a young age to someone who is willing to try nearly every new thing.

Before starting college, I had many expectations. I expected to always be prepared to learn material by myself as I expected all my classes to be in one of those large lecture halls. I also expected not to make any friends at all within the first few weeks. I mostly expected college to be completely different from high school. However this was clearly not the case. I currently only have one large lecture hall class, and even in that class my Professor teaches the material well. Due to the fact that we have a class block, it was fairly easy to become friends with the students in my class, as well as making friends in an afterschool club. Furthermore, my first semester at least, is very similar to high school in the sense that the class sizes are rather small and most of my classes are with the same people.

I hope that this semester will give me an insight as to what is to come for the next four years. The workload is definitely different than what I am used to and I hope that I will be able to stay organized and get all my work done on time. My main concerns are forgetting about assignments and tests, and as a result losing points off of my total grade.