One of the important learnings for me from this course has been to question my role in service learning and at the place where I volunteer. The first few themes for this quarter talked about the motivations for service and self-awareness of our social location. Especially, the reading by Johnson, motivates me to think about the privileges and power that I have over the other people, and how I could use that privilege to help people. I would say, before these readings, I knew about my position but was not aware of the power that I had in being a part of the change. I was mostly ignorant of all the things happening around and these readings really helped me understand the problems at hand and be a part of the bigger movement. …show more content…
Engineers are problem-solvers who apply knowledge of math and science to improve the lives of their clients or to solve problems. With service-learning, it would help me in understanding the environmental and societal context of any issue by working with the clients. In addition to learning analytical and scientific concepts through textbooks, or learning in GENST 348, would help me gather the opportunities to apply my knowledge and skills to solve real world problems.
Many different universities have incorporated service-learning into their curricula to address the contextual, motivational, and multi-disciplinary team needs. A lot of undergraduate engineering programs (as ranked by U.S. News and World Report,) currently have service-learning programs within engineering or have an introductory course on service learning for students beginning their education in engineering fields. According to a study done recently showed that service learning produces positive personal, social and learning outcomes, improvement on personal identity, moral development, commitment to service, and critical thinking skills. This gives a benefit of good engineering practices, including designing for ease-of-use testability, and maintenance, while delivering real values to the