By Camlyn Giddins
Service Corps Program Director
The cure to all concerns, whether academic or social, may be involvement, specifically in service.
Rachel Pulsipher from St. George innocently walked into the Y-serve center one day to get training for a mentoring program, but ended up with a completely different result. After an encounter with the Center for Service and Learning director, Casey Peterson, she ended up on the planning committee of the Freshman Service Corps.
Fittingly, Pulsipher sat in the Stop ’n’ Serve office for her interview and laughed, “Everybody’s story starts when they walked into the office and Casey saw them,” she said
The Freshman Service Corps is run for freshmen by freshmen (although others are never turned away). Each month, the Service Corps Council and their committees organize a service activity for freshmen to take on. In 2010, the service corps had more than 638 volunteers contributing over 3,277 hours.
Activities included yard work at the Provo Library, caroling at retirement homes, playing with disabled children, making quote boxes for assault victims or recycling bags to send to Africa for craft making. They also teamed up with various other programs in the Y-serve Center, including Sport’s Hero Day, Adaptive Aquatics, Adopt-a-Grandparent and Y-ACT and several others.
Tiffani Bodhaine from California served on the Freshman Service Corps last year and will be one of the program directors next year.
“An advantage to being a leader on campus is that you get to better know campus and people like Casey or BYUSA members that might be able to help you in the future,” Bodhaine said. “It also makes you more comfortable on campus. Lastly, it introduces you to other leadership opportunities you can take on and expand.”
“When you put [freshmen] in the position of being the helper instead of the insecure, inadequate person, it balances out all of that and helps them to find their place and to start to build into something bigger and greater than themselves,” Peterson said.
Like many others, Pulsipher recommends getting involved in service, but especially with the Freshman Service Corps.
