Taking Time Off: A Year of Community Service

Putting Off College for Real Life

After high school graduation, I decided to take a year off before going to college. My life up to that point had been focused intently on my success in the world of ideas. I can remember working on projects and studying for tests, ensuring my status as Valedictorian. I can remember countless memorable hours in my English teacher's room or writing my own poetry. I can remember the trips to participate in the State Mock Trial. I remember the sweaty palms, the anticipation, and the overwhelming joy of fellowship, of hearing compliments, of the self-confidence of presenting powerful arguments. I remember nights lying awake, my mind racing with pictures and ideas ranging from physics to political theory to good literature. I remember walking across the stage at graduation having won every award, having gotten my acceptance to college, and feeling on top of the world.

The Call to Serve

I also remember the moment this summer when I realized that I needed to put the world of ideas on hold and pursue the call I felt to serve. This decision defied all of my college professor father's expectations, shocked my mother, and sent an earthquake through my relationships with almost everyone I knew. Nevertheless, I joined AmeriCorps, moved to Austin, TX and began working with sixth through eighth graders labeled "at-risk."

Up until that time I thought I had to go directly to college. In my mind, childhood became the constant putting off of real action in favor of amassing ideas and knowledge. At eighteen, my head was full of ideas, but I lacked a foundation of reality to put under them. I felt the urgency to act--to create experience, understanding and purpose to carry back to the world of ideas.

Little Successes

I have been greatly rewarded for my decision. My successes have been minor ones, unnoted in newspapers and magazines, even in my telephone calls home. Just before Christmas break, I was standing in a white-tile, darkened hallway in the Alternative Learning Center in Austin, a place for troubled students. A few weeks earlier, I had been greatly disheartened by the news that one of the students I had been working with had been sent there. I viewed the referral as a great failure on my part. I felt like I had let the child down by not being a good enough mentor to keep her out of trouble.

When the student rounded the corner into the dismal hallway where I stood, her eyes lifted to mine, and I saw a look of delighted surprise, a recognition that someone had come to see her specifically. I was given the Christmas gift I never expected: a sense of contribution, of well being, of success. I realized my responsibility was not to "save" this child, but to be there for her. It did not matter whether I reformed her; all that mattered was that I had been there. She was not alone.

Creating Community

My AmeriCorps experiences taught me the meaning of sympathy, the importance of attempting to understand what people are dealing with before evaluating their worth, the significance of perseverance, and the awesome power of hope.

I know now the responsibility of what I have been given. I have met Poverty and I can name her. I have met Hope and I have befriended her. I have met Loneliness and I have battled her. I am an eighteen-year-old who knows herself and knows what she wants. I am going to college now because I want to go, not because I am supposed to go.

College, I expect, will give me the tools to engage in meaningful conversation and to create community. By building a foundation that creates community for myself, I want to be able to continue to go out into the world and be that person for other people in need. I want to make and be the connection.

I am a different person than I was. I am grateful for what I have. I know the reality of responsibility. I know the strength that I carry inside me. I recognize now that my AmeriCorps service has truly been the introduction to my story and it was the introduction I needed to write.

Elizabeth Daniel graduated from a Texas high school in 2002 and decided to postpone college for a year to serve in AmeriCorps. Ms. Daniel later attended the University of Chicago. AmeriCorps engages Americans in intensive service to meet community needs in education, the environment, public safety, homeland security, and other areas. Among the many benefits of serving in AmeriCorps, most AmeriCorps members receive an education award following successful completion of their term of service that may be used to help pay for college or qualified student loans. For more information about AmeriCorps call 800/942-2677.