Turning the Page

The opportunity to be a part of HON 496 this Spring 2023 semester has provided a deeper understanding of the intrinsic motivations that have shaped many of my major life decisions.

The very few experiences I had volunteering in my early life always left me wanting more, but between growing responsibilities and declining energy levels, the older I got, the less involved I became. However, the need to serve others remained.

A major in hospitality management spoke out to me when nothing else did; building a career on the foundation of service seemed right up my alley. It wasn’t until I took a second-year seminar, “World Thought and Experience,” that I revisited my lost passion for reading and more importantly, explored fresh perspectives on the vitality of human connection and our responsibility for our community’s quality of life.

A few months into the seminar, Dr. Jerinic introduced me to the notion of serving others on a broader scale, through public policy, an idea I had never contemplated. The more I thought about it, the more the Brookings Public Policy minor felt like something I had to do. The hours upon hours of research for my introductory policy course never felt like a drag because I enjoyed reading and expanding my knowledge on recidivism. The more I learned about the tendency of an individual who has been released from prison to re-offend and return to a correctional institution, the more policy initiatives I thought of to serve those in our community stuck in the vicious cycle of incarceration.

Through HON 496, I was able to combine my passion for helping others with a revitalized love for reading. For 2023, I adopted a New Year’s Resolution consisting of daily reading, starting with 10 pages a day and gradually increasing as it became an unmissable aspect of my day. During the difficult weeks, my reading time became so much more than an excuse to procrastinate; it became a respite from the stressors of life as I envisioned the ideas or stories in the text play out.

The ability to provide people, who have stressors far beyond what I could ever imagine, with that same, albeit brief respite, is one I hold dear because of my experiences in this course. Seeing the reactions of the women and children as we explained that books were free for the taking during our Book Fair at Shade Tree was both endearing and saddening. The generosity of our community’s donations seemed, at least for a moment, to relieve them of the hardships that had led to the shelter.

Becoming a catalyst for these types of experiences is what I’ve always wanted to do.