To serve your community means to exhibit selflessness. It means to recognize that we are privileged in ways we do not even realize and that we should help those who are not. We sometimes forget that we are privileged, for example, we are able to have a quality education, and pick our own career path. By helping people, we are actually bettering ourselves because we unconsciously develop numerous life skills along with new knowledge, and not to mention, we gain satisfaction along the way. We also learn to practice kindness, which leads to other acts of kindness and consequently, a better world for all of us to live in. Through community service, we are also able to learn more about our personal motivations and our interests outside of the classroom.

As a Baruch Scholar, my role is to develop new skills and learn new knowledge through novel experiences. Through this program, I hope to find different opportunities to help various groups of people. “Helping” someone is such a broad term because we can help people in countless ways, but sometimes we get so overwhelmed with this that we don’t know where to start. Thus, this program gives us a much-needed push.

The culture of service at Baruch college is especially evident in the honors students, who are required to fulfill certain hours of volunteer work. I believe that if these hours are spent wisely, we will hopefully not only benefit others but also ourselves.