Summer Volunteer Program Analysis

When I was in the eighth grade, I made the decision to begin volunteering at York Hospital through the Summer Volunteer Program. At the time, I was planning to major in pre-med and wanted to eventually become a physician. I joined the program to explore this career path and discover what specialty I may have wanted to pursue in the future. After my first day of volunteering, my mind was completely changed about becoming a physician, I realized that I wanted to provide more hands-on care to patients to have a greater impact on their lives. I never could have predicted the tremendous impact that this program has had on my life and on my career choice as a nurse.
After my first summer volunteering, I discovered that I had a strong desire to help my community though the world of health care. I made it my goal that summer to complete 500 hours of community service with WellSpan Health by the time I graduated high school. This summer, through hard-work, dedication, and many early mornings and late nights at the hospital, I reached this amazing goal. Each summer, I easily completed the hundred-hour requirement, but in order to reach my goal, I had to complete two hundred hours in this fourth and final year. Two hundred hours over ten weeks meant that I spent an …show more content…
made me cringe, and it would’ve been much easier to simply call out “sick” or request off, but that meant I wouldn’t have met my goal, or couldn’t have made a difference that day. So, I made it a point to wake up every day with a smile on my face, knowing that every second I was volunteering, I was helping a family cope with the loss of a loved one, calming a patient down before a big surgery, or discharging someone who finished their final cancer treatment and were ready to return home. There is no feeling like knowing you’re making a difference each and every day, and that is a feeling I want to continue feeling for the rest of my life as a