For me, summer has always been a time to explore: the world, my interests, myself. In the summer after my freshman year, I biked from Florida to California with an organization called Bike & Build, raising money and awareness for the affordable housing cause and building homes with Habitat chapters in different towns along our route. After sophomore year, I worked in a Microbiology lab at Montana State University in Bozeman, studying water contamination on the nearby Crow Reservation, and then traveled to Ecuador with Engineers Without Borders. After junior year, I had the opportunity to backpack in Chile and Bolivia with my first friend ever (we met when I was one week old, and she was two weeks old) and then worked in NYC for the Department of Parks & Recreation, designing rain gardens for city parks. While some were more transformative than others, these experiences have helped to clarify the things that I care about, and to formulate my personal and professional goals. If nothing else, I hoped that the summer after my graduation would direct me in a similar way.
So, in thinking about how I might like to spend the summer, I reflected on an experience I had during high school. For three weeks during the summer after 10th grade, I was a participant on a community service trip to the San Blas Islands of Panama, where we worked with the Kuna Indians to build a school out of local materials. The experience I had with The Road Less Traveled is etched in my mind as the one that sparked my interest in poverty-related issues overseas, and I thought that maybe, I could spend the summer igniting that same interest in the souls of other 16 year olds.
With this thought in mind, I applied to be a leader with the Road Less Traveled. The application, itself, took me almost a month to fill out, as I spent an obsessive amount of time answering 13 short answer questions. In five single-spaced pages, I described my energy level, my experience working with teenagers, my strengths and areas needing improvement, and my experiences traveling and working with indigenous communities.
To give you a sense of what I wrote, this was my response to a question on why I was interested in the position: "To me, the most appealing aspect of being a leader on a Road Less Traveled trip is the opportunity to engage interested and like-minded students in an on-going dialogue about the importance and complexity of service and inter-cultural interaction. I look forward to the chance to inspire young people to continue to lead lives of public service, with the understanding that a well-informed diagnosis of existing problems (within our own communities and elsewhere) is key to implementing sustainable and appropriate solutions. Additionally, I am excited to travel to places I have never been before, to think on my feet when conflicts or unexpected events arise (because I know they will), and to create a warm and welcoming environment for the students, so that they are challenged, and pushed beyond their comfort zones, but never feel unsafe." As you can probably tell, I was thoroughly excited about this opportunity!
About a week after submitting my application, I had a really fun interview with the logistics director at RLT, in which we talked about my interest in the position, my values, my hobbies, ability to improvise, and how I would handle various social situations. What would I do if I found out kids were drinking alcohol on the trip, or having exclusive romantic relationships? The interview was nothing like anything I had ever done before - it was a challenging conversation in which I openly and honestly shared myself, my beliefs, and my experiences. And two weeks later, I was hired to lead one trip in Ecuador, and one in Colorado! What an incredible sense of relief I felt to know that I had a plan for my life after graduation, and with the big day just two months away, I felt like I could relax and breathe for a second.
Interestingly, it wasn't until I arrived at staff training and was surrounded by 46 other leaders - likeminded in their passions and love for adventure - that I felt completely comfortable with my summer job. While my classmates seemed to be headed for the corporate world, I was preparing to sleep in a tent in the mountains of Ecuador and work with teenagers, and build bathrooms and paint educational murals at a small school. And when professors asked about my post-graduation plans, part of me felt proud and excited, and part of me felt embarrassed. What would they think of me if I spent four years getting an engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon only to spend the summer working as a camp counselor? There was no way, I felt, that I could relay to them how my experience in Panama had shaped my life, and how meaningful I anticipated this summer being. I see, now, that the reason I didn't feel I could convince the world (friends, professors, strangers) that what I was doing was legitimate was because I couldn't convince myself. I was not totally sure that this was the absolute best use of my time, and I wondered whether I wasn't setting the bar high enough for myself to do something great.
I graduated from college on May 15th, and two weeks later, packed my red Osprey backpack (love that thing), and headed West to Colorado to take a Wilderness First Responder course (required for my job). There, I spent ten days getting to know a group of people passionate about adventuring in the great outdoors and sharing these experiences with others. We learned how to deal with altitude sickness, hypothermia, and heat shock, to fractures, dislocations, wounds, infections, burns, head injuries, chest injuries, lung injuries, seizures, asthma, strokes, and heart attacks... and that was just our trauma unit! Our medical unit covered mental health issues, abdominal pain, diabetes, asthma - to name a few. After the WFR course, I headed down to meet the rest of the leaders working for the Road Less Traveled (RLT). Staff training was absolutely amazing!! It was incredible to be surrounded by so many energetic, fun-loving individuals who all, in their own way, are eager to explore, learn, and contribute something meaningful to their communities. I felt I had truly met my people
In Ecuador and Colorado, I learned to balance the responsibility of taking care of a large group of teenagers with taking care of myself, understanding that my ability to do one was inextricably linked to my ability to do the other. During these trips, I worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, earning a whopping $2.08/hr, and had some of the most beautiful, challenging, peaceful and rewarding experiences - exploring new places with new people who soon became family, and exploring myself. I wrote more in my journal this summer than I had written in the past two years combined, and came back to New York at the end of the summer feeling like I had achieved a sense of clarity about my next step. I realized, also, that life (and my life's work) is about the journey, not the final destination - about the process, not the product. i am slowly putting the pieces together, making personal connections, learning new things, experiencing new places... and for now, that's valuable.
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