#IWill Week: My awesome experiences in social action
Hi it’s Mikail and I’m the Vice-President of the Hub! This week the Kingston Hub is supporting the epic message of the #IWill Week campaign, where all of us will be commiting to do one thing to help the cause. My pledge is to cycle to university every day of this week to help combat climate change!
In addition to this, I want to talk about what I’ve been doing to bring about social action — in particular bringing out the potential and excellence in students who haven’t yet realised it. Take for instance my role as an academic mentor. Being a second year biomedical science student, I was offered the epic opportunity to mentor incoming first year students in a specific module — an opportunity which I just couldn’t turn down (in fact I replied to the email within 1 minute and 3 seconds to be exact!). Whilst being a humbling experience for me, my motivation really lies in the fact that I believe that it is a myth that lectures and support from academics is always enough to succeed academically. It’s just not the way it works.
Some students simply don’t learn by staring at a board and robotically transcribing for two hours straight. Which is exactly why academic mentoring exists. So many of my mentees — whom were so hesitant and unwilling to interact and learn to begin with — are now actively asking questions and willing to give answers without fear of being wrong. The feeling when you get when a student comes up to you and expresses how much they loved the session and how they can’t wait to come next week epitomises why youth social action is just a brilliant thing to get involved in. Everyone is epic, it’s just finding a way to get that epicness out in the open!
But my work helping students doesn’t stop there. In the past, I’ve mentored children with special needs. I’ll never forget when a particular student- partially deaf and blind student — who I mentored over the past year, came top of his class for the first time. He opened his results and without a second thought threw his arms around me in a tight embrace. Through a strong, communicative relationship, he transformed from a quiet, unconfident boy to a determined and aspiring student. It’s just a really rewarding experience second to none.
So how does this all link to #IWill Week? Well, this fantastic campaign has the aim of getting young people involved and excited by social action and empowering them to become active citizens — whilst gaining epic employability skills. What’s that? You’ve heard that somewhere before? Yup, that’s right, the ethos of Kingston Hub is very similar to the #IWill campaign, which is why we’re giving it a massive thumbs up! So what can you do to get stuck in? Even if it’s for a week, pledge to do a single action which will help your community — and remember — no act is too small!
If you like the sound of helping out your community whilst having fun and polishing up your CV, don’t stop at a week! If you want to get involved in awesome social action projects, look no further than the Kingston Hub. There’s bound to be something for you, whatever it is that you’re interested in. In the meantime, keep being epic!
