From being in a Public Service and Community Action this semester, it has taught me more about what my community does. I’m a freshman at Florida State University, and I took this class as an English 2 credit. To start off in the class, we had to read different articles relating to volunteering. There was one that stood out to me called ‘Backpacks vs. Briefcases’. The author talked about how we make so many observations that relate to rhetorical analysis and how we make observations without realizing it, and we keep it in our mind. It’s important that we do that while volunteering because then we can incorporate it into our research. We were assigned five projects throughout the semester and they all revolved around the organization that we were volunteering for. The projects were a little hard to complete but in the end it was really rewarding.
           Volunteering for the organization was really interesting and fun. I volunteered for the Museum of Florida History and went two separate days. The first day, I went for an hour and a half and did a self-guided tour. The self-guided tour was really interesting because I have never been to the museum before. The volunteer I talked to gave me a phone looking device and if I pressed the number that was on the exhibit, it would tell me about that exhibit. There were a good amount of numbers to listen to, but it was worth it. The second and last time I volunteered was on a Second Saturday for three and a half hours. Second Saturday is an event that is every second Saturday of the month, and there are arts and crafts for kids from 11:00-12:30. That was probably my favorite part about the museum. Not a lot of kids came, but the ones that did were very energetic and cute. There were other volunteers there that I had the chance to talk who, who were so nice and interesting. One volunteer was a senior at FSU, majoring in history, and planning to move to England after graduation. Another volunteer was a girl in high school who volunteered on her free time, which I thought was very nice. The museum program supervisor, Bonnie McCluskey, showed me around and I mostly hung around her on the Second Saturday. She is so sweet and is never mean or has an attitude. Her job is to supervise the activities that the museum has for field trips and such, and she also sits at the front desk to greet visitors and help them. From this organization, I have learned that it is important to always be nice and respectful, even if the customer is not. There was a husband and wife that came to see the museum and the husband was asking Bonnie so many questions, almost like he was testing her. But being the kind person that she is, she always replied with civil responses.

            From this whole experience, it has taught me about what your community can provide. It’s a great way to meet many interesting people and a new way of understanding your environment. Volunteering at an organization can open your eyes to a vast amount of knowledge that you did not know before. This course was will always help me in the future, as I can use the experience and reflection from it. With the start of this course, I was a little nervous with all of the assignments and volunteering that we had to do. Now that we’re at the end of this course, I am happy that I took this course, because I think that it is better than a regular ENC 1102 class. I hope that people can take this class and consider what impacts they can have on their community.