More than academics

If the 91 members of the EMU Facebook group "Classes are Ruining my College Experience" are representative of student opinion, the message is clear: students want an education that is about more than bookwork.

We're blessed to be at EMU. We're blessed to be part of a university that cares about both academic and spiritual growth, a place where we can interact with a diverse group of peers, explore new ideas, and express our unique selves. But sometimes it feels as though the academic requirements get in the way.

Students who are stressing over assignments and projects don't have the same freedom to stop and chat in the coffee shop or meet someone new walking down the sidewalk. For some, there's a great deal of pressure to do everything. We are overwhelmed with opportunities and we feel the need to take advantage of as much as we can while those opportunities exist.

The college experience is about more than academic classes. We learn more by processing ideas, through late-night discussions with peers and hands-on experiences, than by simply reading texts and listening to lectures. Recognizing the value of this kind of learning is the basis of EMU's emphasis on community or service learning requirements. In addition to the 15 hours of service required for first-years as part of First Year Seminar, individual majors have certain courses designated as community learning courses.

Ideally, these requirements would get students involved in the larger community, help them forge connections and gain experience valuable to their field of interest. However, when we try to assess this learning, we tend to fall back on measures of quantity rather than quality. It is the number of hours spent doing service that matter, not what we're really learning during that time. Students end up arranging service assignments on the basis of ease, and not necessarily those that will be most pertinent to their field of interest.

Perhaps our definitions of service are also flawed. We assume that "doing service" means offering our time to a specific organization for a specified amount of time according to a regular schedule. We might be learning as much if not more by simply engaging in campus life and opening ourselves to being full present in the moments. If we put in "service hours" at the expense of spending time with fellow students, are we learning so much more about building community? The very idea of making service a requirement may devalue its voluntary nature and interfere with other opportunities.

As students, we want to make optimal use of the opportunities we have while we're here. We want to study and delve into academics, but we also want to learn from those experiences that can only be had by chance. We find ourselves drawn in multiple directions, and sometimes as we are encouraged to actively participate in the wider communities, we miss out on the opportunities right at our doorsteps.