Placement: Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House
Dear incoming students, welcome to my blog!
Like yourselves, a year ago, I was browsing blogs just like this one in hopes of learning more about Trek. I had many uncertainties and questions. What should I expect from joining Trek? What sort of roles will I take on at my volunteering placement? Is it a good choice for my education? In the end, I took a leap of faith and joined Trek. Eight months since then, I am here to tell you that it has truly been a rewarding experience and I invite you to take that same leap of faith.
The months that I have spent as a volunteer at the Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House has been a colourful experience. The highlight of my time there is the variety of people I got to work with. As Frog Hollow is an organization that seeks to cultivate a healthy and diverse community, throughout my volunteering, I got to meet individuals of all different ages from different cultures and countries. In the end, it is these people who have made my Trek experience truly enjoyable. The staffs at Frog Hollow are all very warm and supportive. The thing that surprised me the most was how much trust they invested within me. My supervisor seemed genuinely interested in my opinions and even asked me to help her plan future volunteering activities on several occasions. The members of the program that I worked with are international students who come from various parts of Asia. It was nothing short of fascinating to observe at such close proximity how these different ethnicities and nationalities, with their different languages and cultural practices, intersect and interact with one another. This diversity in community has made Frog Hollow a rich learning and research environment for a sociology student.
A key aspect of Trek is that it offers a site in real life where you can apply your learning. Perhaps you already know that. However, as it is a rather abstract statement, I will provide my own understanding of it through my experiences. Instead of exploring the academic concepts one learned in class through online research and readings assigned in discussion sections, Trek students have the opportunity to observe these concepts take place in real life. As Trek students are expected to write reflections of their volunteering experiences and relate it back to their course material, the same time that I am an involved participant at Frog Hollow, I am also a bystander observing and identifying the sociological forces propelling the social and cultural dynamics within the organization. My supervisor helped to facilitate my efforts by providing me with a lot insight into the community that Frog Hollow works with. She informed me of the hardships facing the international students, the economic problems associated with funding neighbourhood programs and even their interaction with governmental institutions. I believe that these real life instances make learning more three dimensional and academic information more relatable to our daily lives.
Beyond being a help in my academic endeavours, Trek has helped to integrate me into the university life by providing a social platform and extracurricular opportunities. At Frog Hollow, the importance of community is emphasized above all else and I find the same principle valued in the overall Trek organization. Aside from going to your volunteering placements, Trek requires you to attend several workshops and dinners where you get to mingle with other Trek students and explore social issues. This expanded my social circle at UBC for I got to meet students from different majors and years. Trek also made it easier for me to navigate the expansive resources offered by UBC by helping me tap into the vast extracurricular and leadership opportunities offered on and off campus. With its team of student leaders and staffs who advocate for further student involvement within their communities, Trek has enriched my university experience by extending it beyond that of my academic life.
All in all, I encourage you to sign up for Trek! Use the opportunity to learn outside of the confines of classrooms and get to know the society that you are about to enter, instead of simply reading about it. I’m not saying that Trek will be the perfect experience. It certainly has its disadvantages. The greatest challenge that I have faced this year was the time investment it required for me to commute back and forth between campus and my placement. However, like every problem, there is a way to navigate it. I learned that as long as I managed my time wisely, the 2 hour transit every week was no problem. The community experience and the connections I gained from Trek are well worth the challenges that it presented. If you are a hands on learner, this is a leap of faith that I strongly recommend for you to take.