I’m highly uncoordinated,  and I find running around in front of people extremely embarrassing. I was hit in the mouth with a softball in 6th grade (sad), and was cut from the 8th grade girls basketball team for my inability to do a lay-up (it’s hard). Recognizing my lack of athletic prowess early on, I switched my focus to school organizations to grow my high school resume. But after a brief stint in Spanish club, my extracurricular involvement dwindled down to nothing. Time passed and intervention occurred by way of a parental mandate, and I had no choice but to find new opportunities to differentiate myself from other college applicants.

Enter Menorah Park nursing home. I spent a good three years of my life calling bingo numbers and serving chicken schnitzel and cottage cheese to people who claimed to hate me for serving it to them. Man, volunteering sure felt good.

I must not have been entirely scarred by my early volunteer experiences, because when I was introduced to AIGA as a student in 2003, I jumped right in. I held various roles with the organization—student representative, programming planner and volunteer coordinator, event attendee—yet couldn’t help but feel like a bit of an outsider. It’s intimidating as a young designer to break into the cliques of more established professionals who have known and worked with each other well before you even knew what design was. Still, I continued my engagement and preached the power of volunteering.

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