Freshman Service Project Essay

The Freshman Service Project is the first service that I have ever done in my life. Although I have volunteered to help in local events and charity organization occasionally throughout high school, those can’t be classified as a service. Unlike volunteering, which only benefits the recipients, a service benefits both parties, the helpers and the people that we are helping.

The Freshman Service Project in my opinion is a brilliant way for us college students to give back to our society. It is beneficial not only to the children who we are working with, but also to myself. The Freshman Service Project benefits me because I get to learn more about the engineering design process and familiarize myself with it. But after all, the Freshman Service Project benefits the children the most, they get to have some fun with our projects while getting exposed to engineering, which might be influential and have some impact with their career decision later in life.

I plan to incorporate additional services like the Freshman Service Project in my career as an engineering student and future engineering career. The reason is because I realize the FSP is more than
just a project, it is related to the big picture of service to the community. The service project is a system of giving back to the community. The FSP is fundamentally similar to those services in a global scale, such as educating children is undeveloped country or rebuilding houses for areas that have been struck by natural disasters. Since I love giving back to the community, I plan to host services throughout my career to offer free tutoring for subjects in math and science to high school students in my community.

Whenever I work on the Freshman Service Project, the motivation that keeps me going is my desire to expose these children to the different college majors.
When I was a senior in high school, I had absolutely no idea what I want to do once I graduate. Although I planned to enter a university after graduation, I had no idea what to major in or what I want to as a job. During my college application, I wished I was more familiar with the different major and have more insights of what each major does. During the Freshman Service Project, my team and I will be walking through the engineering design process with these kindergarteners, hopefully this will give them enough exposure so that when they are picking their college major in the future, they will have a better picture of the engineering disciplines and what engineers
do.

As I work on the Freshman Service Project, I have noticed two issue about our project that make me and my group feel uncomfortable. The first issue is related to safety and the second issue is related to time. Safety for our group is a serious concern since we are working with kindergarteners. Originally, my group planned to have the kids build our project from scratch using templates. However, building the project from scratch requires scissors and knifes, which can be dangerous for kindergarteners to work with. In addition, it might not be feasible for the kids to make everything from scratch since we only have 2 hours. The method that my group will use to address this problem is by making a kit for our project with the all the materials already cut and shaped so the kindergarteners only have to glue the project together.

The most valuable service that I think I can offer at my site is knowledge. Since we are undergraduate students, we have accumulated much more experience and knowledge than the kindergarteners. So for the Freshman Service Project, I would like to share some of these experience and knowledge with these kindergarteners, hopefully giving these children some insights into engineering and educate them about the engineering principles behind our projects. During the Freshman Service Project, my group and I planned to explain some of the technical aspects behind our project and how we use engineering to solve some of these issues.