A Morning of Chaos

This past Friday I had a fantastic volunteer opportunity here on campus. Without much competition, this was definitely the greatest experience I have had all Semester, and possibly this entire school year.

So BYU has this fantastic volunteer program set up called Y-Serve and through their office you can basically find something to do in any field of service. Like seriously there are a ridiculous number of service opportunities. 

I've done a few things through Y-Serve before, but I haven't really gotten terribly involved this year (reference previous posts about the brilliant idea I had to take 18 credits and work 20 hours a week) and I have seriously been missing out. 

So I'm a little bit unsure exactly how this all got started a few weeks ago, Michaela saw a sign somewhere and came home and told us about it and one thing led to another and fast forward to last Friday at 8:30 a.m. with Michaela, Tanisha and I standing in the chilly wind in front of the Wilk holding big cardboard signs that say "Central 1" and "Franklin 13."

Pause for a minute so I can explain the idea of what we were doing. The program that we volunteered with is called Project Youth and their goal is to educate 5th and 6th graders and get them excited about higher education. https://www.facebook.com/byuprojectyouth <--excuse my brief advertising. Basically the whole idea of this particular event was to just show the kids some cool stuff on campus and explain to them what college is about and what kind of opportunities exist here, and then to get them really excited about it. 

There were 1,200 5th and 6th graders who came to campus, and each of the volunteers had 2 groups of 10 students that we were in charge of for the morning. Naturally, my group was one of the last to come and by that time they were about to jump out of their skin they were so excited to be here and also to be off of the busses. My kids were from Central (elementary school, middle school...? eh, not really sure..).

By the time they arrived, we were already late for our first mini-lecture, and due to a typo on the schedule we ended up at the entirely wrong building, so by the time we found it, it was supposed to be over. However, the professor really wanted to give a brief snippet at least, so we combined with 2 other groups and spent five or ten minutes doing hand motions to the William Tell Overture. 

Then we had our campus tour. Now there are two things that I didn't really think about when brainstorming ideas for the tour. First, when I took my tour of campus I really didn't feel like I saw anything besides the outsides of a few buildings, and we were in a golf cart. Second, 6th graders, despite the fact that most of them are about the same height as I am, do not walk nearly as fast as college students. Especially 5'0 college students who are perpetually late and seem to plan their schedules with classes all the way across campus from each other (so me).

Because of this we only really got to explore one section of campus. I let them look down the stairs to lower campus right by the FOB (the little building by the Tanner), and then I took them inside the Tanner (I have a small bias because it's one of my favorite buildings, but I probably would never have discovered it if I hadn't worked there). We just went down to the second floor atrium and looked around, but there are flags hanging on the walls from every country that is represented at BYU, so I had them identify as many as they could.

After our tour we trekked over to the Wilk and they got to sit through another presentation by some Chem students. That was probably their favorite part of the whole thing. They got to see things glow and explode and whatever else it is that all those Chem people do in their free time. Next came what was probably the most chaotic event of the whole day: all 1,500 of these kids gathered in the Concert Hall in the HFAC so that they could hold a huge rally and get the kids excited. They succeeded. There was lots of noise and dancing and excitement and all around happy times. It was great :)

Basically this was just one of the coolest experiences. What a great opportunity to be able to do service and get to hang out with some pretty rad 11-year-olds.