Goal 2

Community involvement is a major part of the Honors Program. In multiple classes, I took part in community experiences or volunteering opportunities. The program has two major outcomes it wants students to achieve. The first is for students to enact solutions to real-world problems for individuals and society. The second outcome is for the students to reflect on the solutions they enacted. This goal wants every student to seriously consider problems they see in their communities and attempt to change them for the better.

I need to fulfill the first outcome, enacting a solution to a real-world problem, before complete the second outcome. The most involved community involvement project I did was in Community Problem-Solving. Our projects during my semester in the class were individual projects as opposed to a larger group project. We could take on large or small projects. I did a smaller project and my first artifact is the project proposal for this project.

My goal was to help tutor in the Computer Science department. I wanted to share the experience that I have gained over my five years in the department. Another main reason that I wanted to do this as my project was because a student helped me significantly in some of my classes and I am very thankful for his help. The main way I planned to do this was online. Students could email me with questions of with their code so I could look at it and try to figure out what is going on and what I can do. I would meet with students in person if they would like. The reason I focused primarily on online work was that I was rarely on campus otherwise I would be at home working on other work. I would do much of this with the help of the chair of the Computer Science and Mathematics Department. He had no problem with me doing some tutoring. Normally tutors for the department are paid based on their hours worked, but they also were required to have some time that students could find in the computer lab if they needed help. I did not get paid because I was volunteering, and I did not want to be paid for the work I would be doing. Also, because I did all my tutoring online, there is not much I would need to be paid for. He also reprinted some posters found around Model Hall to include my contact information. A few weeks later I also talked to the professors of the Computer Science program to let them know that I was offering tutoring and I would be ok if they recommended people to me.

The second outcome for goal two is reflecting on our projects. My artifact for this outcome is the slides from the final presentation of the projects in Community Problem-Solving.

My project did not go as well as I had hoped. In the end, I only tutored four people. Two of them I already knew, and they caught me when I was on campus to help them out with something quickly. I do not believe that my project was a failure, just not as successful as I hoped. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first reason is the Computer Science program is great about providing opportunities for students to work on their assignments in class during lab days. Here they can get as much help from their professors as they wish. I think this alone covers many of the problems that students may have. The second reasoning is that emailing their professors with their problems is just as easy as emailing me, and they will get more concrete answers. I believe that if I could dedicate more time to staying in the lab, more people would ask me for help on convenience. The major issue is that my project itself was very passive. It relied on people coming to me for help instead of me doing the work. With tutoring, however, I do not think there is an effective way to increase the number of people to help.

Goal two is a significant part of the Honors Program. So much so that there are two classes that students can take that are entirely devoted to the completion of this goal. Using knowledge and experience from course work and using it to solve issues in the world provides for an early experience of what our lives could be after completing college. I did struggle with this goal considering that I am not an outgoing person. I enjoyed helping the students that I did, but I wished I could have helped more. I think the lessons that I learned from this experience will translate well into my career after college.

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