On September 6, I participated in the eleventh annual Day of Service hosted by the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. This is an event that usually only lasts a few hours for each project. However, it still has an impact not only on the Stockton community, but the larger community around us. During this day, there were many service projects such as Books Without Borders, Girl Scouts, Water Watch, and others. I ultimately choose to give my time to Water Watch because there was a big group of us, and we had done clean ups before. Also, it was one of the few we could do together and seemed to be the one that interested us the most. Within this project, the goal was to contribute to making and maintaining a cleaner environment.

On this day, we personally helped the environment by doing a clean up of the campus. We were given gloves, trash bags, and grabbers, and we split into smaller groups and had designated areas to clean. However, since our campus is one of the cleanest in New Jersey, there was not much to clean up at first. Once we looked closer, though, we saw that there actually was a small problem with trash. Along the walkways and around the buildings, there were a large amount of cigarette butts. We cleaned up all of these and the other little amount of trash that was left. The cigarette butts were by far the hardest to clean up as they were tiny and hard to grab. This was annoying because there were so many and most were not even near the gazebos.

Although the cigarettes were annoying, it was overall an enjoyable experience. I was able to spend time with friends, listening to music, while also contributing to making a better, cleaner environment. It was hard work in the hot sun, but it made me feel good about myself knowing that I helped keep our campus beautiful. I know that most people won’t even realize what I have done, but I would definitely do this project again. I believe that clean ups are important because someone has to take steps to keep our environment clean.