What, So What?, Now What?

During the community service event we completed certain tasks aimed at teamwork and communication, in order to earn pieces of a bike that we had to assemble. I didn’t learn any new technical skills during the volunteer work, though I did meet more people in the summer program. The experience was different than I expected because while I was there it didn’t feel like I was there to do work. I thought the event would be more concentrated on finishing as many bikes as possible or doing something that was more strenuous. I liked that we got to meet people, but I didn’t feel like I was really being useful in terms of the larger task of volunteer work. I learned different approaches to each problem we had to solve by working with the other members of my group. I also learned that the whole event was based on quality of the interactions rather than the quantity of bikes assembled. Overall I learned that sometimes it’s not necessarily about the apparent task at hand but what you can learn along the process of completing it. To apply this in lab, when learning a technique, I can use that time to become more familiar with my lab mates and learn something greater than simply the technique. In the next few days or years it may not be important to know how to assemble a bike but quality socialization is always an applicable and important skill. If I had to do the group activities again I would’ve maybe tried to help put together the bike. Also, I would have tried to talk to more people that I didn’t know instead of staying in my comfort zone and talking with the people I was already familiar with.