Students serve résumés and communities through Golden Key

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The last blackberries of the season are quickly harvested, and fallen leaves have their final crunch before they are gathered up for the season. The Golden Key club has arrived, and although these BYU students’ mission may be one of service, they show no mercy to the fallen leaves littering the yard.

“This is my favorite kind of service,” said one student as he moved freshly trimmed hedge clippings into a box. “You can see what you’ve done and that it looks better now.”

Some 15 BYU students from the Golden Key club spent an afternoon doing a service project for a widow living in Provo on Oct. 26.

“It’s nice to have all these young people here,” said Janice Davies, the recipient of the service. “It looks lovely.”

Benjamin Jorgensen, the service committee chairman in Golden Key, took Davies’s arm as they walked around the yard, surveying what had been done and what still remained. Some students tried to shake the remaining leaves from the trees, and others headed over to the garden. They cleared the bushes away from one side of the house, and Davies said she could see out of her living room window again.

Davies wouldn’t let the students leave until she had gone down to the cellar for quart mason jars of her homemade grape juice and given them each a glassful — or three.

The Golden Key is generally known on campus, if it is known at all, as a “résumé-booster” organization that helps link top students to graduate school. However, Golden Key president Bryan Teuscher said the club’s main focus is actually service and leadership.

Teuscher said the club aims to “improve (students’) experience at BYU and make them more marketable.”

Golden Key is a national organization for college students, although alumni never stop being members. Teuscher said the BYU chapter invites the top 15% of students to join annually, and roughly 500 are currently members. Teuscher, who is also the regional representative for all Golden Key chapters in the Northwest, noted that the naturally service-prone environment at BYU can make it difficult for Golden Key to stand out in the same way it does at other universities around the country.

“I feel like it reflects well on BYU that we’re all pretty good students,” Teuscher said.

However, he also said that BYU has done well in the nationwide competition for $1 million worth of Golden Key scholarships. Golden Key is currently forming committees for students interested in club leadership, and Teuscher urged any interested students to contact him at .

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