During a student’s four years at Wake Forest, we hope that they will learn, embrace, and ultimately live our motto, Pro Humanitate (for humanity). Many of our students already come to us with past volunteer service experiences, or at least a well-developed sense of wanting to serve the greater good and use their talents to help the issues and problems of our time. Many of our students also come to us with some international travel experience (a big difference between this Millennial Generation and mine, Gen X, where far fewer of us had traveled abroad prior to Wake). There is an opportunity for students to blend those two notions – service and foreign travel – via International Service Trips.
Wake Forest has a rich history of offering these service trips – in places like Calcutta, Moscow, Vietnam, and Rwanda to name a few. The students that go on them have a transformational experience. They see things like poverty and illness and incredible need that they may have never been exposed to before. For many of our students, they also see joy they would not have expected amid such difficult conditions. And certainly our students’ worldview is broadened from these service trips.
There is a video that was made several years ago where students shared some of their experiences. You should watch it to see what kinds of remarkable experiences our past travelers had. Look on the bottom of the Service Trips page for the Youtube video and click on it.
Would this be something your student would want to do? If so, please share this information. And I imagine for some readers there may be some hesitation in thinking about your student traveling to a Third World country. Please know these trips are vetted and we work with other agencies who do these sorts of volunteer engagements regularly. If your student has a heart for this kind of work, please encourage him or her.
