Instead of traveling through Europe, tanning at the beach, or returning home, 62 students decided to take a different and potentially cheaper kind of vacation. As part of the Leonard Carmichael Society's (LCS) Volunteer Vacations, students spent just $40 to travel to one of several different locales on the East Coast to help others in various tasks - both mental and physical.
Volunteer Vacations offered five destinations for this spring break: Morehead, KY, Assateague Island, MD, Detroit, MI, Wilmington, DE, and Philadelphia, PA. In Philadelphia and Detroit, the volunteers worked with elementary through high school-aged students; in the other locations, volunteers worked on environmental and housing construction projects.
Though rewarding in other ways, these trips, which LCS has sponsored since the mid-1980s, did not provide students with leisure and relaxation, according to senior Jon Lieber, the LCS co-coodinator.
"It's hard during spring break when you want to be somewhere warm, but everyone on my trip got a lot of it and are really proud and glad they went," he said, adding that student feedback "has been so positive."
"Everyone had a terrific time," he said. "It sounded like everyone's trip went really, really well."
The students left on the first Sunday of Spring Break and returned one week later. The five trips gave students a chance to see new parts of the country, Lieber said, as well as the opportunity to meet other students.
The Volunteer Vacations "expose kids to other places, other socioeconomic backgrounds," he said, "and [help them] make some friendships."
Lieber led the Detroit trip, which gave a violence prevention and conflict resolution presentation to inner-city elementary, middle, and high school students. The group was sponsored by Save Our Sons And Daughters (SOSAD), an organization started by families that lost children to violence.
Lieber's group visited four schools - two elementary, one middle, and one high school - where they sent pairs of volunteers to several classes each day. The Tufts students spent a short time with each class, forced to cover 12 to 17 classrooms daily, and were not always able to connect with the kids.
"It was pretty challenging, going in for half an hour to make a connection with kids," Lieber said, adding that he had some successes with the kids, but other times left disappointed.
Overall, Lieber said the week was a positive experience. "It was still super rewarding, very educational for us, both for the Tufts students and hopefully for the kids in the classroom," he said.
Sophomore Uyen Tang had similar feelings about her trip to Assateague Island, though her experience was fairly different from that of the Detroit volunteers. At Assateague, the students worked for the National Park Service to build a fence on the island's sand dunes to prevent beach erosion.
In addition to the pretty view - the group faced the ocean as they worked - Tang said her vacation was both fun and fulfilling: "It was a nice, different spring break experience. I felt productive helping other people out," she said.
Sophomore Matt Rickeman, who took the trip to Philadelphia to tutor elementary school children and work with high school seniors on school projects, also felt his work was rewarding. "I thought [the trip] was awesome," he said. "We could see the actual results we were getting."
Often, Rickeman and the other volunteers would make suggestions to the high school seniors about their projects and see them come in the next day having "really put in the effort and taking our suggestions," he said. "The smaller kids seemed to understand a lot of what we were telling them," he added.
In addition to helping others, freshman Janet Mapa, who went to Detroit, and sophomore Matt Alford, who went to Morehead, KY, felt that the trips exposed Tufts students to new living environments.
Mapa's experiences in Detroit made her aware of the urban environment. "What we were exposed to being in Detroit - I've never seen such a rundown, desolate situation," she said. "It was an incredible eye-opener."
During his trip down south, Alford said he learned a lot about a part of the country with which he had always been unfamiliar. "I learned an incredible amount about the area of Kentucky and about poverty," he said. "I really haven't traveled much around and figured it would be a good way to see different parts of this country."
According to Rickeman and others, students' social lives improved as well. "I got to meet a lot of Tufts students I probably wouldn't meet otherwise," Rickman said.
