My initial thought regarding the volunteer experience at the Mary Washington Multicultural Fair was to wonder who usually helped to set up the event as out of the perhaps 20 people there, roughly 75% of them were graduate students from our class. We were given 4 hours to set everything up which seemed to be much more time than we needed. However, I believe we were given that time out of previous experience as few people, particularly college students, want to get up at 6:00a on a Saturday morning. For the most part, the Mary Washington staff seemed very competent and knew what needed to be done but the equipment that was rented did not arrive until 8:00a so the first few hours of our volunteer experience were spent mostly standing around, waiting.
One thing I did observe was that many of the graduate student volunteers, which were most of the volunteers, were type A personalities, or “chiefs.” As a result, they seemed to struggle with the idea of simply serving and responding to another’s leadership and instead attempted to lead themselves. Yet with so many leaders, there was more struggle and personality conflicts than I believe there may have been had more people taken a more serving mentality. Although my team blended and worked well with each other, observing some of the other teams attempting to manage each other rather than working as a cohesive unit was, quite frankly, amusing and made me very thankful that my team did not have that problem.
Volunteering is not something I have the opportunity to do often. Between work, spending time with my family, and taking care of things at my house there is not a lot of free time left over, let alone the time needed to volunteer for an event. Yet it was nice to be a part of a group and to work towards a common goal, specifically one that was not completely self-serving or self-seeking.
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