Volunteering I've Done
Volunteering is something that has transformed my life. I was introduced to it through NHS and was quickly drawn in by the welcoming nature of the other volunteers. I've since volunteered at several different places and am a part of multiple volunteering groups.
Haven is a club for LGBTQIA+ students and allies at my university. We foster a safe space for queer people on campus to talk about discrimination, seek support, and make friends. Haven is a place to talk about general LGBT issues and to build a community among affirming people.
Falcon Racing is a club set to compete in the Baja SAE competition every year. The club builds a car from the ground up that meets the correct specifications established by Baja. Most members on the team are Mechanical Engineering students, but the Electronics team is made up of Computer Science students. I am working with two other people, Mark Clemmer and Brennan LeBlanc to equip the car with a working digital dashboard.
The digital dashboard is being built using a Raspberry Pi 4, and is coded in Python using the tkinter graphics library and sqlite3 to write to our database. The final product will be able to sense and display the current gear of the car, the fuel level of the car using a fuel flow sensor, and the speed of the car in real time.
As this project is a constant work in progress with three people, it is constantly being updated and changing. It also has a lot of physical components that are hard to display digitally. If you would like to see it please message me! I'm proud of what we've made so far and I would love to talk about it!
I was the Vice President of Period Club in High School. Period Club is a feminist group with the main focus of raising money to buy menstrual products for homeless women. This is important because it's often an overlooked need.
Period also has a heavy focus on de-stigmatizing periods. As a guy, I can look at this from a different angle. While my reaction to them was never outwardly harmful to anyone, back in Middle School I was still confused by periods. No one ever explained what they were for or what they were like. I can understand why some young men have the reactions that they do. The average response to these types of people is with blacklash, but I feel like this approach is pretty counterproductive. In my opinion, the best way to stop these reactions is to be open about the topic and show people that periods are completely normal.
Key Club is one of the most important organizations I've been a part of. It is a student run club with many volunteering opportunities to take part in. We've done everything from digging an irrigation trench at my local elementary school with Eden Acres, to serving pancakes to the community, to directing runners at a fundraiser race for the homeless, to helping out with the Annual Corn Roast in my home town.
What originally got me into volunteering. We needed 75 outside volunteer hours, 15 school volunteer hours, and to maintain a 3.5+ weighted GPA to graduate with an NHS diploma.
I first joined the winter shelter to get volunteer hours for NHS, but it soon turned into much more than that. For six weeks I spent a day helping prepare food for an hour and a half or so. We made all kinds of food and I gained a lot of teamwork skills.