A different kind of service

About a month ago, I attended an info session presenting a post-graduate year working abroad with a not-for-profit. At the end, one of the hosts posed a question to the audience. The way she saw it, loads of kids come into Princeton having done community service by volunteering throughout high school, but something happens during their time here, and, instead of graduating loads of kids into not-for-profit, volunteer-oriented jobs, we place them at consulting firms, banks or other corporate entities. This career trajectory was presented as a non sequitur for the once civically minded. She wanted to know: What was it that happened?

On the outset, I followed the logic of such a quandary. Maybe we do lose our commitment to community. Or maybe we stop doing as much community service while here — we’re busy people — and when it comes time to find a career, we’ve forgotten that long-ago interest. But I quickly rejected these ideas.

While we are busy, we all seem to have maintained very active, passionate connections and commitments to our communities. Although I believe in and understand the phenomenon of the ‘Orange Bubble,’ I’ve yet to feel that we actually have separated ourselves from an awareness and interest in the world around us. Multiple organizations on campus host trips to do community service work at sites anywhere from Trenton to Las Vegas. These range from weekly visits to week-long Breakout Trips and are well attended — they are often forced to cap the experience at fewer students than expressed interest in participating.

My next thought was that perhaps we just become cynical with age. As high school students we were probably all top dogs. It was pretty easy to believe that the reason the world hadn’t gotten it right yet was because we were still living at home — but once we got out there things were going to change. Hitting college, especially one such as Princeton, is a total affront to the ego and self-confidence we built up. Suddenly, we weren’t the silver-bullet who could do and change anything. Not to mention that we’re forced to acknowledge how vast and entrenched the world’s problems are. I took an economics course and environmental course in the same semester, and, between the discussions of financial breakdown and climate change, I became more and more convinced that the world was doomed, and I might as well just sit tight — it was too late, the problems were too big, and I’m just one voice.

But the thing is, most of us do still believe in our abilities — and all the better that we now have a more complete, informed perspective of the world. Our ambition is more in check than those pre-license days (or whatever you city slickers who don’t drive cars think of them as), but we still apply for competitive, highly selective jobs; we still posit opinions on how to solve the world’s problems; and we still believe once we are the decision-makers out there the world’s problems may not be solved, but things will at least be notably better.

I think that’s why we may stray from traditionally-defined ‘community service.’ We realize the scale of the world’s problems and the ways in which they came about, and we dedicate ourselves to studies that will allow us to fix what went wrong, or at least to make a better guess at how to get it right. We’ve redefined our understanding of what it means to serve our community. It’s not always the fun, hands-on projects the phrase calls to mind. Attending a Habitat for Humanity build is great, and clearly an act of community service. But I think we realize in our years here that so is advising low-income housing policy or directing a bank to offer more credit to low-income applicants and then teaching the recipients the financial management skills necessary to maintain credit scores, helping them to grow their net worth instead of tying them to a never-ending stream of payments greater than they can afford.

Sure, these are select examples. Not all positions at a bank handle work like that, and it’s certainly not in the job description for hedgefunds or most consulting positions. But it’s these not explicitly community-oriented positions that I’m most interested in looking at with a wider understanding of community service, one that I think we develop while here.

I think we realize that money is a utility like any other public resource — water, electricity, etc. — so the entities that have the largest impact on that resource are the jobs that most need redirecting from community-minded leaders. Institutions explicitly dedicated to community service self-select employees with the same values. But jobs that define themselves otherwise have as much, if not more, of a need for these same individuals. As we’ve seen recently, policy writers, big businesses, banks and tech firms all have a huge impact on the world around us. What we most need today is for civically- and community-minded individuals to work there — not the already well-intentioned not-for-profits or community service entities. We’re in college, and, as with so many other things, we learn to make complex, difficult choices. And so many students pick the less pretty-sounding, less heart-warming jobs and serve our community in a different but still globally important way that will have lasting effects.