An appeal for volunteerism: If not for others, do it for you

Telling people that they should volunteer is like telling them that they should donate a kidney. Both sentiments invoke an unnecessary moral burden. 

Don’t worry, I won’t tell you that you should volunteer. Rather, I’ll tell you how volunteering can actually benefit you. 

Let’s be honest, we’re all guilty of getting caught up in our own world. For a college student, that world is easily dominated by classwork, friends, significant others, personal crises, etc.

But volunteer work can take you out of your own world and bring you closer to that of others outside of your personal and professional circles. It opens you up to different perspectives and experiences. 

I’m an aspiring doctor, and the perspectives I have gained from volunteering will affect the way I take on that role in the future. To a large extent, volunteering will make me significantly more sensitive and aware of my patient’s needs.

Currently, I volunteer at the Children’s Hospital of UPMC and Family House. Both venues are medically oriented, and I interact regularly with people who are experiencing severe illnesses. 

I have never been severely ill, so I can’t claim to understand what the feeling must be like. But, through volunteering, I have come to understand challenges pertaining to both illness and the medical process itself that I had never previously considered. 

For example, volunteering at Family House — a nonprofit organization that provides affordable patient and family-oriented housing to patients traveling to Pittsburgh for medical care — has given me a glimpse of the wearying effects that medical treatment has on the lives of patients and their families. 

Factors such as schedule changes and treatment alterations have drastic effects on patients’ lives, perhaps to a greater degree than those in the medical setting can foresee when they make sometimes arbitrary changes to a patient’s treatment. Volunteering has given me a special insight into the effects of these factors. 

At Pitt, there are a number of students entering the medical field. But, regardless of what field you hope to enter, experience with a wide breadth of perspectives can only help you relate to the different types of individuals you will inevitably meet. 

I’ve interacted with the young and old, the poor and rich, the northern and southern and a variety of different races through volunteering. Regardless of apparent differences, there are always similarities that spark a connection. Now, I am aware of how insignificant trivial differences truly are, and I am more open when it comes to making connections. 

Sometimes, we lose perspective of why we do what we do, why we’re here in college and why we’ve chosen to enter the fields that we have. For most of us, that correlates with a passion for working with people and developing skills that can be meaningful in the lives of others. Volunteering reminds you of that purpose. 

The benefits one gains from exposure to different lives through volunteering are not limited to his or her resumé. This exposure can also drastically affect your personal life.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of volunteering is the way that it takes you out of your own world. The worlds we create for ourselves can be fun and exciting, but they can just as easily be stressful and anxiety-inducing — hello midterms! I don’t know about you, but there are only so many chemical structures a person can look at before going insane. 

When I volunteer, it’s as if I’ve paused my life for a moment, and, in that moment, nothing else matters but the people I am serving. There’s nothing more rewarding than knowing that I could make an impact in someone else’s life, regardless of how small the impact may be. 

That alone makes the entire process worth it. 

Write to Bethel at beh56@pitt.edu