How Service-Learning Aided My Transition from N.U.in to Campus

One of the best parts of N.U.in, besides the travelling, legality and cultural immersion, was the routine established in a city that I never would have guessed I would call home, even for just a few months. At home, I drove my car to school every day, and I ate at Farmhouse, my favorite restaurant near my school in Demarest, New Jersey. I frequented Cool Beans, a café in my hometown, River Edge, during the day for coffee and later at night for desserts. Suddenly, in Berlin, it was Cucumma, the café located in the entrance of our global institute where I began my days getting breakfast.  Instead of driving, I took the U-bahn on our street, Gneisenaustrasse, and my new late-night spot was Curry36 where friends and I fell in love with Berlin’s famous currywurst.

Just as I began settling into this new routine, I found myself on a plane to Boston.

Signing up for classes was one of the first moments that I realized how dramatic of a change my arrival in Boston would be.  Connections and Decisions was the first chance that I saw to adjust to my surroundings by venturing out of Boston and to honor the old routine that I began to really miss.  My Tuesday mornings in Berlin were devoted to service learning at the Leibniz-Schule, the neighborhood school, helping with beautification.  I knew that the service learning section of Connections and Decisions would be a time commitment and that it wouldn’t be a way to get flown back to Germany to do service, but I still knew it was a good way to keep active and find a new role in my new home base.

Sara Leavitt, my Connections and Decisions instructor and Explore Program advisor, quickly became one of my favorite people on campus, and the seminar was something I could look forward to once a week.  Within the first few classes, we were informed about which service sites we could choose from and we chose our preferences based on compatibility with our schedules and whatever interested us.  I was fortunate enough to be paired with Tutors for All, an organization which has branches throughout Boston at high schools which require students to participate in after school tutoring for the MCAS, the standardized test taken by all high school students in Massachusetts.

Each Saturday morning, I took the bus to Codman Academy, a charter school in Dorchester, where I would tutor one to two students in Math and Humanities.  My first day, I attended the regular meeting for tutors before the students arrived. I was placed in one of about five groups of tutors, and I was shocked by the organization of the program.  While I was very nervous that my location was simply a service site where you clock in and out in order to log hours, I was pleasantly surprised.  I found myself each Saturday at 8am surrounded by invested tutors that actually cared about what and especially who they were teaching.  During recap meetings after tutoring sessions, we discussed experiences with students, and we spent time brainstorming ways to improve our methods and personalize our approaches.

The transition to campus from being abroad your first semester is one that is different for everybody.  To some friends, it was surprising that I joined a service learning section of one of my first classes on campus, since for them, focusing solely on their main classes was their priority.  To others, like me, and many in my close-knit Connections and Decisions class, it was important to keep busy and take on a greater role in my new community.

Thanks to this class, I made one of my best friends on campus, I formed a relationship with a kind and trusted academic advisor, and I established one of the first parts of my routine, days at Codman with Tutors for All which continued even after the semester ended.  My experience was even the starting point of my greater involvement in the Explore Program, for which I am now a N.U.in mentor. Sure, when I returned to campus, I was scared about the transition and I couldn’t get my late-night currywursts, but the improved scores of my students, and new community of others who truly cared about their work as tutors encouraged me immensely and were even better than my #5 with fries.