Most of you know that last fall I got involved in a student organization on campus called Environmental Alliance. I hadn't been involved in any real organizations until then and i decided that it was about time to get involved in the campus. By the time spring semester came around, I got drawn further and further into the organization and ended up being deeply involved in almost every environmental event and made contacts with some of the most important people at Georgia Tech. I felt like if I wasn't at class or doing homework, I was at some kind of meeting with Housing, Facilities, RHA, Recycling, or SGA. It was almost too much to handle at times.
Why does all of this matter? I think the key to success in college or in the real world is to find a cause that you care about and become passionately involved in it. Whether it's the environment, human rights, volunteer work, charity, the arts, or anything else that ultimately helps to make the world a better place--it adds more of a meaning to your life. It gave me the motivation to keep working hard in my classes.
At this point in my college career, I have no idea how I made it through past semesters without being involved in some sort of organization. The monotonous nature of Georgia Tech's course curriculum (especially for engineering) seems like it's enough to drive a student to madness without something else to balance it out. One of the things that GT needs drastic improvement on is overall balance of it. As a science and math school, it should require students to take at least one humanities or arts course each semester. The amount of science and engineering classes that they make us take is borderline ridiculous. There's no way for us to become well-rounded people who can contribute to society without having a balanced curriculum. This doesn't just apply to math and science-related majors--liberal arts majors should be taking plenty of science and math courses as well.
We students need to become more involved in the world around us. Next semester I'll try to dedicate even more of my time to sustainability initiatives at Tech and in Atlanta. We made some big steps last semester with the overall sustainability of Georgia Tech, but it still has a long way to go. And as you can tell from my last couple posts, I'm really excited about the direction that the city of Atlanta is moving in. The Beltline keeps progressing and I really want EAGT (my organization) to get more involved in the community by volunteering for the Beltline initiative. Something else that I'd like to get involved in is Engineers Without Borders. With so many things going on around me that I'm interested in, I couldn't think of a better time to be a college student.
