If you think students spend all their spare time avoiding studying, going out with their mates and having a good time then you'd be right. Well our student bloggers do anyway. While they assure us they don't slack on the study, they've got a lot to answer for when it comes to enjoying themselves while volunteering.

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Monday Jun 15, 2009

End of the student year....

"I don't know what you are complaining about – us students work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 2 weeks a year."

And that's only true if you work hard during exam time. However, as exams are for some reason an inherent part of the University experience (like debt), I suppose it is only fair to note how it can affect volunteering as a student.

Under some blind assumption that I was going to do some revision, I actually asked both the Citizens Advice Bureau and the Sheffield Live radio station whether I could cancel all of my commitments for three weeks over my exam period. Thankfully they were fine with this, and I guess that is just one of the more obvious upshots to some types of volunteering – as long as people aren't too dependant on you, it can be very flexible.

After my exams, I started drinking and smoking again. But aside from this, there was also a 'volunteering showcase' of all the work that the volunteering committee at my university has done over the past year. The start of this showcase was a kind of gentle social mingling affair, and so I excelled in socially awkwardness and knocking into people. More importantly though, towards the end there were speakers from charities, schools and the Lord Mayor about how they had benefited from the volunteer work done by students here in Sheffield.

I think volunteers generally do things regardless of whether they might by thanked or not, but this was better than a 'thank you' - it provided examples of what had been achieved by volunteers over the year, from helping children get through their exams, to raising money for cancer care. Which can show a lot more than a 'thank you' anyway, and is probably a better way of recruiting/keeping more volunteers.

Speaking of the flexibility of volunteering, I'm moving home for a while now, so I'll have to see what else I can get up to in terms of volunteering

Posted by Harry ( 10:33 PM )
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