Having this class as a service-learning course has helped me develop a few personal qualities of mine. A big one that this course helped me develop is my skills in collaboration. I was not bad at collaboration before, but this class has really helped me to hone that skill. I liked having projects that we worked in groups on because we were able to bounce ideas off of each other and, ultimately, create something that really worked for the assignment. Sometimes when working alone I tend to focus on one thing because I think it is the best way to do something, when in reality, there may be a better way to get an idea across. Another personal skill that has been honed is my empathy. I have always been relatively empathic, but I have never experienced working with people like refugees. Refugees have no idea about much of anything when they flee their country and move to a new one (after the extremely long process). There are two videos that really impacted me during this class, and they were the video about the little girl and the virtual video put on by the New York Times. Those two videos really allowed me to put myself in the shoes of a refugee. Also, attending a few airport pickups contributed to my empathy for refugees. Travel is exhausting in and of itself, but being at the airport late at night knowing that the refugees arriving have been travelling all day, really expand my empathy.
This class has really helped me to recognized different points of view on the issue of refugees. Coming in to this class, I was not really sure what I thought about refugees. I was extremely uneducated in the refugee crisis that is currently going on. I was unaware of any legislation or political remarks about refugees. After this class, I have been able to form some of my own ideas about the situation at hand. I wrote a blog post at the end of the semester about the issues surrounding refugees today. I had never written anything like that blog post before and it was a good feeling to finally be able to write something like that. While I do not feel completely informed on the issues, I feel much more informed than I did when I walked in to class on the first day. The biggest thing about service-learning that I have found to be difficult is fitting service opportunities to my schedule. At the beginning of the semester, it was difficult for me to fit the various service opportunities offered by NICE in to my schedule. One thing that really helped make this easier was having service opportunities be activities such as making donations, writing blog posts, and creating different things for NICE like a new logo. I did not participate in all of those activities, but make donations and writing a blog post really helped me out because I was able to do those things on my own time.