Service and the Liberal Arts

Hello and Welcome to the Hundreds of People Who I'm Sure Will Read This Daily! :)

Alright, let's do this. Blog post number one.

The majority of the service experience I have ocurred when I was in highschool, though I do have some college involvement. For about 5 years, I was involved in Operation Christmas Child, where our family would host an event for people to come to and fill shoe boxes with presents for children overseas. Majority of my service experience has been with the Salvation Army, with volunteering as a bell ringer, volunteering for coat drives, among other events. In college, I have volunteered my time at the Swiss Valley Nature Center as a part of another class, and went on the Loras SOA trip last year, which wasn't exactly service-based but as part of the experience, we volunteered our time to help set up for the event, and took shifts at night watch over the site as well. So, although I so have a background in service and volunteer work, I have never consistently and on a weekly basis volunteered at a service center or with an organization, and so I am excited to see what this experience will be like.

Very generally, I believe Loras has greatly prepared me to connect with the world outside the classroom, if not just by giving me a location to mature and grow as a person. A lot of growing up occurs when one lives away from home for an extended period of time, and this experience has done this for me. What we get out of our college experience is what we put into it. Loras has also helped me prepare for the outside world through having multiple ways to get involved around campus and gain responsibility with leadership positions, as it is a smaller school. Loras has helped me grow intellectually and academically through its academics and the chance to interact with people from varying degrees of backgrounds, has helped me grow into a mature person through the responsibilities of living away from home, as well as multiple other ways which I probably do not even realize.

Through this course, I hope to achieve a better understanding of what my college experience has meant for me, where my specialities lies, etc.--and I think a lot of this will happen through the aspect of reflection in this class and the final portfolio. I am excited to see what I will come up with.

In terms of how a liberal arts education contributes to the development of a good character, I believe this depends on what deems "good character." In my definition of good character, I believe open-mindedness and development of the whole person (kind of like the "Renaissance man" of old, but more modern) is important. At a liberal arts college, I would hope that people would become more open-minded in the first place due to the variety of opinion and the diverse student body that one usually finds at a liberal arts college, let alone any college. I also believe that discussion in class, classes that do not always have just majors for that academic work but others due to the academic requirements present at aforementioned college, would be more diverse and interesting. A person will become more wholly developed overall through taking a plethora of different classes, not just classes for their specific major.

I believe some virtues the liberal arts is good at helping students cultivate are: tolerance, open-mindedness, respect, and independence. Aspects of my character I believe Loras has helped me to develop include is my aforementioned maturity, fairness, openmindedness, and individualism, just off the top of my head.