The place I chose to volunteer at was Ignite Food pantry on 49th street; I volunteered on two different days, October 29th from 2-4PM and November 5th from 11:30AM-2:06PM. While I was volunteering, I helped families and students organize food for their well being. Also, I helped organize and place food onto the different shelves when the stock got low. I chose to volunteer at Ignite because I enjoy helping others and I also like working through different food pantries. My experience there was amazing and I would not mind going back there to continue to help out with the food pantry.

Ignite is a faith based organization that gives volunteers the opportunity to serve not just ODU students, but faculty and staff as well. Ignite offers different programs such as mentoring, food pantry service, bible studies, and places of worship. Ignite offers these opportunities to all Old Dominion students. The organization really stands out to help everyone and it shows from their service as I was volunteering.

While volunteering at Ignite, my ideas of who I want to be when I get older and what I want to do have greatly changed. Because of Ignite, I know that my love for helping others is something I would want to do for the rest of my life. Besides my career, Ignite has helped me grow in my faith and why serving others is important to my me; since I was little, I have enjoyed working at different food pantries and homeless shelters to help different types of people. Ignite has helped me lean towards my major the two times I have volunteered there.

Before coming to my first semester of college, I was able to shadow my aunt who is a nurse. She showed me around her clinic and I was able to meet a majority of her patients. Also, during  my junior year of high school, I was able to have the opportunity to shadow a sports medicine surgeon and scrub into surgery with him. Because of these two experiences, I knew that being in the health field was something I wanted to for my career. Based on my experiences, I believed the three opportunities have helped me develop who I am and what kind of health care professional I want to be. There are so many different parts of the health professions that I believe that I will be happy doing anything within medicine. The experiences that I have done with the different organizations have taught me patience is a key part in any profession and that hard work will get me to where I want to be. I am the only person who has control on what I want to do in life and these experiences have taught me that. 

For the career I want to pursue, I believe my service learning experience helped me understand what more I want to do with my intended major. I understand that helping people is a typical reason as to why anyone would want to be a nurse, or go into the medical field at all, but I believe that it is more than helping others. I want to be able to make people smile and interact with them in anyway possible. With my major, my dream is to work with kids and to change their idea about going to the doctors; I don’t want them to be afraid but to get excited when going for a simple check up. My goal is to change the mindset that kids have about going to a doctors office and I believe my experiences with Ignite and before I started college can help me with that. I believe my services could relate to a health professional wanting to change and help recovering alcoholics or drug addicts ( I forgot the specific name of the program, sorry Jacob). Growing up, my father struggled with alcohol and still does; this has affected my family and how I grew up. I want this as my alternative because I want to help people like my father and their families. No one was there to help, except for my mother, and this has changed my life. I believe that I can make a difference and not just change recovering alcoholics, but give them everything they need to be a better person. I would not mind pursuing this as my major and I think I would really enjoy it.

At the beginning of the semester, I did not take studying seriously or I would barley study at all. Now, I am studying for each class almost every day and try to make the best of studying. I believe my study habits have gotten better to be honest; I have been going to the library a lot more to take the time to study for my classes. Studying in my room causes me to be distracted too often that I needed to change the scenery. I have noticed that I do better when studying by myself than with others. Yes, each study habit I have does vary by class; for classes such as history or english, studying in a group helps me understand the content more. But for chemistry and sociology, I need to be by myself so I can understand the content on my own first. Both of these methods help and benefit my grades.

I thought college was going to be like high school; I was told college was going to be hard, but I did not believe anyone who told me so. I didn’t believe how much college would break me mentally and emotionally but build me as a person at the same time. Of course I knew college was going to be a challenge and I signed up for it knowing what I was getting myself into. But college is not all that bad, I’m starting to learn who I am as a person and what I want to do with my life; I know my peers would say different, but I love college and how it is treating me so far. One resource that has been helpful was my peer mentor, Jadon Nava. Since the beginning of the semester, Jadon has helped me with different things I’ve struggled with academically or just with life in general. He has really made my college experience pretty good so far and I do not know what I would do if I didn’t have his help this semester. I don’t think any of the resources that I have been given have been unhelpful; everyone of them have helped me in anyway and made my semester easier. I wish I knew how much I would struggle, not just mentally but emotionally as well. I also wish I knew about the workload and that someone stressed to me that college was nothing like high school. I wish someone told me that it was going to be hard and did not sugar coat that college just a “fun” experience. Nobody warned me that college was going to make or break me and it’s only my first semester here. I learned that it will take time to get good grades and that studying a day or a couple days before will not help me. Next semester I will be more prepared and I have my study habits down; I will strive to be a better test taker, listener, and student overall next semester.