A Little About Me

My name is Katie, I am a 21 yr. old attending Loras College in Dubuque, IA. For the last three years I have been involved in the Honors program here at the college, and our capstone class is Service Learning. For this class, we as a group are going to volunteer in a certain neighborhood here in town individually, and then collaborate on a final project. I have volunteered before in my hometown, where I knew everyone and felt comfortable, this will be an interesting journey in which I will encounter new faces and situations, and will hopefully learn a little bit about myself along the way.
In the past, I have volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters, neighborhood cleanups, an after school mentoring program, and a group that helped those in need after a major storm. All of these programs were based out of my hometown, which like I said is very small and everyone typically knows one another. The neighboorhoods back home are all very similar middleclass neighborhoods without much diversity.
Since coming to Loras I feel that I have been prepared well for connecting to the outside world, through learning the dispositions of the college. Here we are encouraged to cultivate ourselves to become resonsible contributers, and at the same time ethical decision makers. We know not only what we should do, we follow through on it.
My trip through the Washington neighborhood on Elm street was an interesting one. As my group was walking, a family sitting on their porch actually heckeled us a bit and it made me quite uncomfortable. It was also very interesting to see these nice banks in contrast to some of the abandoned and dilipadated houses next to them.