Become Active In Your Community

Becoming active in your community is very important, because it allows you to get to know your community better. You get to work in the community along side other people in the community. I personally enjoy doing this because I’m so happy after feeling like I actually helped other people. I am in Alpha Phi Omega, the co-ed service fraternity here at Michigan. We run about 20 community service projects here on campus and also help out at other organization's projects. One of our biggest projects is actually coming up, the Michigan vs. Ohio State Blood Battle. We have blood drives everyday from 8 am to 8 pm for a week for Lifesource. We try to encourage people to donate by turning it into a competition vs. Ohio State the week before the game.

The project through APO that I have been most active with is volunteering at the Hands-On-Museum in Ann Arbor. A few weeks ago I helped out at a critter Halloween party there which was very fun, but today I was able to help out at their Sciencepolooza event. This purpose of this event is to bring in cool activities and get kids excited to do science. When I got there I expected to just be a greeter like I was at the last activity. However, to my surprise this time we were told to each go to a dissection table! I was assigned to frog dissection. I literally had my own booth and dissected frogs in front of the kids coming through. It turned out that they loved it! They had never seen organs exposed like that before. I really felt like I was teaching them a lot and eventually I got over how disgusting the frogs were. I liked that I was able to combine my interest of working with children with working in the community.