Volunteerism 101
How to survive your selfless act
There are three stages to volunteering. The Altruistic Stage, when you’re feeling all warm and fuzzy. You break free of time conserving inhibitions and recklessly sign up to volunteer. You don’t actually have to do anything in that moment of generous time-donation. So it doesn’t matter that you’ll dread it later. And doing something selfless like that makes you feel all special.
Then you hit the Regret Stage. You realize, despite your honourable and selfless intentions, that you might not be prepared for the time commitment. This is also the stage when you realize you can’t back out of your selfless act because you’d be letting someone down (plus they have your name and number). You curse your earlier carefree self.
The Inevitability Stage is the best stage. You’re volunteering. Once you deal with that fact, it gets much easier. Sometime during or after your volunteering ordeal, you realize it was a character building experience. It’ll look good on your resume, and you (gasp) might have even enjoyed the day.
Tomorrow is Student Life 101. And I now have a raging case of second stage volunteerism. I’ve had my ugh-I-have-to-get-up-early epiphany, and am really not looking forward to getting up at 6 a.m. tomorrow.
I know that 24 hours from now, I’ll have enjoyed the whole experience. Now I just have to make it that far.
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We need more people like you at the schools…Way to go!!!
So, how was it? I’m hoping you survived and that shepherding 6000 people around (okay, well helping to shepherd them, as part of a team) was worth every second of lost sleep!
This is a great initiative — nothing calms down the parentals and excites the froshies more than a taste of what is to come.
A similar initiative takes place at Bishop’s University all year round… and most students get paid to do it – not because we have to be paid to tell others we love our university; any Bishop’s grad will tell you that for free