Service Learning Project

A fascinating part of our Writing class has been the service learning component, which we finished this past week.

There are several non-profit organizations in the Fenway which work with Simmons and other local colleges in an effort to engage their students in service learning. "Service learning" was a new phrase for me, and I learned that it entails encouraging students to help a local community group or organization by giving them a credit-based assignment that requires them to work with the group.

It reminds me of companies that encourage their employees to volunteer in the community.

Being a writing class, we were asked to write copy for the web site of a local non-profit in the Fenway. I was the group leader of a team of five women, and each of us tackled a page of the web site. The scope was pretty limited, and we felt like we should be doing much more, but we stuck to the assignment and wrote to the best of our abilities.

I liaised with the community contact, and over the course of a month we stayed in touch to make sure that our project would fulfill the organization's expectations. While we have yet to receive our grades, we all felt pretty good about the work we did.

I really like this component of our class, because it gave us practical, hands-on experience with an actual company facing an actual need. It wasn't writing a theoretical letter or drafting our personal literary narrative, interesting as that may be. It was directly related to the field of business communications, and for that I feel that I have benefited as a professional. At the end of the day, that's why I'm pursuing this degree.