David's Year of Service

The opportunity to serve with AmeriCorps was really one of those "big" moments of my life, the type that you wind up citing any time someone asks about how you've developed into the person you are. AmeriCorps was an enabling experience. It was a world-shifting experience. It was a community experience. It was an experience, in hindsight, I can't imagine not having had in my life.

My service with AmeriCorps had both immediate and long-term impact on my career path. Rather than jump into a job market I was honestly still slightly unsure about, I took the year to evaluate by getting real-world experience. Service is such an eye-opener to potential employers: it gives you that extra edge over other employees by giving a great conversation piece about your service, and it simply says something about you when you are willing to serve a year of our life for the betterment of the community. I had a job lined up within a month of my last month of service that was within the same field in which I had served.

In a more long-term sense, it was AmeriCorps that not only cemented my decision to work in education, but also gave me, again, an edge when I went back to school for my Master's degree.

I learned a complete appreciation for something I had once completely misunderstood and undervalued: community. Whether it's in the form of networking, community service, or a mutual love for an area, community matters.

Getting to lead and facilitate community involvement, getting to observe that, is such a gift. Their community becomes your community, whether you intended that to happen or not. You are working with older adults to make their community better, and their heart becomes your own. It's a completely powerful and utterly overwhelming experience at times, watching this develop over the course of a school year, and being so instrumental in that development.

If there was a "best thing" about my service with AmeriCorps, it would be the relationships formed, and these weren't confined to just peers I served with. It was community members of all ages, it was professionals in a field I wanted to work with, it was incredible business leaders of the organizations we served with.