One Day of Volunteer Work Changes Everything by Eric

One Day of Volunteer Work Changes Everything by Eric - May 2018 Scholarship Essay

What a mess! I still had no idea which career path to take. I picked English as a major because I liked to read and write, and it seemed like a perfect major for those who did not know what they wanted to do. I knew graduation would be around the corner, and I couldn’t stay a professional college student all my life. I planned a road trip to visit a friend at a nearby university to get my mind off making the “big career decision”. Coincidentally, I returned from the weekend with a clear purpose of where I would head with my career.
My friend Ryan was in charge of a service project known as Scouting University. His service group was responsible for inviting nearby Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops onto the campus on Saturday for the scouts to take classes on a Saturday. By the end of the class, the scouts would have fulfilled all requirements to earn a Boy Scout merit badge or a Girl Scout interest patch. Each class was to be taught by a college student, a professor, or a community member. Ryan called in a favor and asked me to teach the Theater merit badge for Boy Scouts.
I did not know what to expect when I started teaching the class. I had ten Boy Scouts in the classroom who were not excited about being in their third-choice class. A few eye-rolls started when I told them we were going to read and act Romeo and Juliet out loud. Fortunately, my second major was Drama, and I had studied for three weeks at the Globe Theatre in London over the summer. Game on.
The bored looks were replaced by laughter as some of the boys took up long cardboard tubes and started re-enacting the sword fights between Romeo and Tybalt. When I came onstage to play the Nurse, everyone started howling. While the idea of a big guy playing Juliet’s nurse looked silly to them, I had to remind them only males were allowed to perform onstage during Shakespeare’s time. I was being historically accurate. During lunch, several of the Boy Scouts still wanted to talk about how the play ended, especially the ninth graders who now understood what they could not decode in English class.
After lunch, we continued with improvisation and pantomime games, design ideas for costumes and set for Romeo and Juliet, and an originally written skit called “Stupidity on the High Seas”, which we performed at the end of the day at the closing ceremony. The final skit, which the class co-wrote, featured a band of evil pirates who kidnapped a waitress. The waitress’s boyfriend had to get a band of good but bumbling pirates to get her back. When the evil captain said he had a mercenary who would destroy the good pirates, one of the scouts entered slowly in a dark robe with a long pole. The captain screamed to his evil band, “You idiots! I asked for a mercenary, NOT A MISSIONARY!” That got the biggest laugh of all from the audience…before the curtain call which had the cast doing a kickline to Simon and Garfunkel. None of the Boy Scouts were nervous performing their own writing, especially with the other troops cheering on their work.
A few of the Scoutmasters came up to me after the closing ceremony and told me how much their scouts enjoyed being in my class. I was glad I had that opportunity to help them earn a merit badge. It was not until after I went to a rock concert a few hours later with Ryan that I realized I had found my career path: I could be a successful high school English/Drama teacher. I decided not to change my major to Education; I would finish my two current majors and then take the Master’s in Education classes to get licensed as a teacher. I owe more to the Boy Scouts I taught that day at Scouting University that they feel they owe me. I may have helped them get closer in their goals of earning enough badges to reach the accomplished rank of Eagle Scout, but I had the one volunteer experience which helped launch me onto a definite career path.
I returned to help at a few more Scouting University events, all of which only confirmed I was going on the right career path of working with adolescents. After a few years of teaching, I discovered I was better as a one-on-one instructor and could help the students succeed when I focused more on them individually instead of as a whole class. Currently, I am looking at School Psychology as a career path where I can help the students in ways I could not do so as a teacher. However, even after I establish myself as a school psychologist, I still will draw my roots back to the first time I volunteered as an instructor for the Scouting University event.