On September 10, 2016, the Fall Day of Service took place, one of the many community service days on campus. I signed up for it not quite knowing what exactly I was getting into, but I was pleasantly surprised. At the very beginning of the day, we chose teams. These teams would determine how we rotated through different activities; there were too many of us to count, so I only really became familiar with my own team.

The day consisted of several different activities, including the sewing and creation of pillows for patients at AtlantiCare, where I attempted to create a pillow that actually looked like a pillow (spoiler alert: I failed) as well as an activity where we answered different questions about the election and politics in small groups. We had previously decided how to preoccupy ourselves for a small duration of the day by deciding what we wanted to do from a list of different volunteer activities; I personally picked a session on Suicide Prevention and awareness, as it is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. The session was quite general, but we all walked away secure in the knowledge that there was a place we could go to talk about our problems and people who cared; this session is actually what drove me to join Active Minds, a club on campus dedicated to mental health treatment and awareness.

The final activity that we partook in was an appropriate send off to the day; in groups of five, we worked together to put together bags of ready-to-make meals that people without access to food in other countries could easily make. It wasn’t necessarily a highbrow job, but there was something glorious about it, about old pop songs blasting on tinny speakers, about the way we methodically moved along, about the unification of so many different people just to do something good. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t know what to expect when I signed up, and prior to this I had felt very isolated, new to campus. And perhaps I’m making something out of nothing, but this day really made me feel like I belonged, like I had a place in this world. My job, when we were making the food, was to scoop a sort of fiber into the bag, and this may be cheesy, but I felt like I was making a difference, one little grain at a time.