My service hours totaled to 64 hours and 45 minutes.  I had more service hours from volunteering at places such as the volunteer center but everything posted on the blog was the bulk of my service hours.

As noted through my blog posts, volunteering at the American Red Cross took up the majority of my summer and the majority of my service hours.  While I volunteered previous summers, this summer was probably the most productive summer as well as the best summer in terms of volunteering for the Red Cross.

At first, I planned on going to the Red Cross and doing the usual, such as filing things away and cleaning up the typical mannequins with baby wipes.  However, this summer had much more planned for me than what I thought it would have.  My volunteering specialist, Molly Mabery, is a sweet and an over-achieving person.  She wanted to make a bigger difference in the South Plains area through the recruitment of more volunteers, especially in some of the more necessary fields such as the Red Cross disasters team.  Thus we started our goal in helping Molly achieve her goal to make a bigger difference in our community and the communities surrounding us.

First, the volunteers split up the North Texas region into 3 parts and searched up as many churches as we could in our respective parts.  I took on the East Panhandle area and searched up close to 400-500 churches in my area.  After the initial planning period, one of the volunteers and I started to call these churches (which totaled to around 1000 churches when we combined both our searches) and asked them to help spread the Red Cross mission through their bulletin boards or weekly announcements.  If the churches agreed, all we had to do was either e-mail, fax, or physically mail all the posters and information to the churches for them to put up these information for the churches and gain our volunteers through this method.  After everything was done (which took us a good 2-3 weeks), I personally wrote letters till my fingers almost fell off to these churches and physically mailed them and e-mailed the rest of the churches when the local Red Cross office was out of greeting cards.

At first, all the planning of this whole thing was getting to my head.  I thought that it would be impossible to finish a big project such as this in the summer alone.  However, our planning proved me wrong as I managed to go through every single step before school started and I had to abandon my volunteering hours to go to school.

Also, there were times when I'd wake up and lull myself back to sleep.  On those days, I tried to guilt trip myself into going and tell myself about the positive effects of the efforts of everybody at the Red Cross.  If everyone at the local office could convince themselves to wake up and do good for the community, I should have absolutely no problem with it. I was glad for being able to clock in over 60 hours at the American Red Cross through this summer alone.

Through this experience, I was a lot closer with the staff at the local office.  Whenever I decide to visit the office to see the staff after this summer, they would all kindly welcome me and talk about daily news with me.  In fact, the volunteer specialist wrote an exceptionally kind recommendation letter for me when I needed to apply for universities and even scholarships.  Of all the recommendations I've received, her recommendation letter might have been the most in-depth of them all, which shows how close we were through this experience.

Also, I've learned to get over my shyness through the hundreds of calls I had to make.  When the other volunteer and I first started to call churches, she had to make all the calls because I was too shy to even speak a word with the churches.  After a while (mainly because she couldn't go to the local office every single day), I had to man up and call these churches on my own.  Soon, it just became a daily process and while I still felt a little nervous when I first pick up the phone when I reach the office in the morning, it was a lot simpler than how I was when I first started in the beginning of this whole experience.

I also gained a new close friend out this experience.  The other volunteer(as I mentioned a couple times above) soon became a close friend as we are currently taking Calculus together here at Lubbock High.  Through our experiences together, we would sometimes trade secrets with each other that no one else have known (if she wasn't lying and I definitely am not lying).  Because of the situation that brought us to become friends, we might know about each other more than some of our other close school friends know and it was really great to know that I found a friend in her through this experience.  In fact, we are hoping to keep in touch and go to Korea together sophomore year of college and have the time of our lives!

Beyond the volunteer recruitment, I also realized my strengths through my helping the local office with online volunteer management.  After recruitment, if people were interested in volunteering, they would apply online.  This was my favorite section because computers are absolutes joys to work with (which is also why I'm going into computer engineering).  Online Volunteering management helped me secure my strength with computers, ultimately leading me to apply for computer engineering by the time university applications rolled around.

On top of everything else I've learned, I also feel that my volunteering effort wasn't put to waste.  After our assertive ways of recruiting increased the volunteers who signed up online or called through the office.  Especially after Hurricane Sandy, I was really happy to know that the American Red Cross was one of the biggest supporters in helping the people in the East coast get back to their every day life.  Even though I didn't directly help the cause, I felt that this experience has allowed me to contribute more to such a cause than I ever could have.

That being said, this situation allowed me to tackle new challenges to directly help causes such as the effects of Hurricane Sandy.  I would love to be able to directly help one day (possibly through the American Red Cross because of my lovely experience with the people in the local chapter) and tack on another chapter in my life of helping others.

My service hours totaled to 64 hours and 45 minutes.  I had more service hours from volunteering at places such as the volunteer center but everything posted on the blog was the bulk of my service hours.

As noted through my blog posts, volunteering at the American Red Cross took up the majority of my summer and the majority of my service hours.  While I volunteered previous summers, this summer was probably the most productive summer as well as the best summer in terms of volunteering for the Red Cross.

At first, I planned on going to the Red Cross and doing the usual, such as filing things away and cleaning up the typical mannequins with baby wipes.  However, this summer had much more planned for me than what I thought it would have.  My volunteering specialist, Molly Mabery, is a sweet and an over-achieving person.  She wanted to make a bigger difference in the South Plains area through the recruitment of more volunteers, especially in some of the more necessary fields such as the Red Cross disasters team.  Thus we started our goal in helping Molly achieve her goal to make a bigger difference in our community and the communities surrounding us.

First, the volunteers split up the North Texas region into 3 parts and searched up as many churches as we could in our respective parts.  I took on the East Panhandle area and searched up close to 400-500 churches in my area.  After the initial planning period, one of the volunteers and I started to call these churches (which totaled to around 1000 churches when we combined both our searches) and asked them to help spread the Red Cross mission through their bulletin boards or weekly announcements.  If the churches agreed, all we had to do was either e-mail, fax, or physically mail all the posters and information to the churches for them to put up these information for the churches and gain our volunteers through this method.  After everything was done (which took us a good 2-3 weeks), I personally wrote letters till my fingers almost fell off to these churches and physically mailed them and e-mailed the rest of the churches when the local Red Cross office was out of greeting cards.

At first, all the planning of this whole thing was getting to my head.  I thought that it would be impossible to finish a big project such as this in the summer alone.  However, our planning proved me wrong as I managed to go through every single step before school started and I had to abandon my volunteering hours to go to school.

Also, there were times when I'd wake up and lull myself back to sleep.  On those days, I tried to guilt trip myself into going and tell myself about the positive effects of the efforts of everybody at the Red Cross.  If everyone at the local office could convince themselves to wake up and do good for the community, I should have absolutely no problem with it. I was glad for being able to clock in over 60 hours at the American Red Cross through this summer alone.

Through this experience, I was a lot closer with the staff at the local office.  Whenever I decide to visit the office to see the staff after this summer, they would all kindly welcome me and talk about daily news with me.  In fact, the volunteer specialist wrote an exceptionally kind recommendation letter for me when I needed to apply for universities and even scholarships.  Of all the recommendations I've received, her recommendation letter might have been the most in-depth of them all, which shows how close we were through this experience.

Also, I've learned to get over my shyness through the hundreds of calls I had to make.  When the other volunteer and I first started to call churches, she had to make all the calls because I was too shy to even speak a word with the churches.  After a while (mainly because she couldn't go to the local office every single day), I had to man up and call these churches on my own.  Soon, it just became a daily process and while I still felt a little nervous when I first pick up the phone when I reach the office in the morning, it was a lot simpler than how I was when I first started in the beginning of this whole experience.

I also gained a new close friend out this experience.  The other volunteer(as I mentioned a couple times above) soon became a close friend as we are currently taking Calculus together here at Lubbock High.  Through our experiences together, we would sometimes trade secrets with each other that no one else have known (if she wasn't lying and I definitely am not lying).  Because of the situation that brought us to become friends, we might know about each other more than some of our other close school friends know and it was really great to know that I found a friend in her through this experience.  In fact, we are hoping to keep in touch and go to Korea together sophomore year of college and have the time of our lives!

Beyond the volunteer recruitment, I also realized my strengths through my helping the local office with online volunteer management.  After recruitment, if people were interested in volunteering, they would apply online.  This was my favorite section because computers are absolutes joys to work with (which is also why I'm going into computer engineering).  Online Volunteering management helped me secure my strength with computers, ultimately leading me to apply for computer engineering by the time university applications rolled around.

On top of everything else I've learned, I also feel that my volunteering effort wasn't put to waste.  After our assertive ways of recruiting increased the volunteers who signed up online or called through the office.  Especially after Hurricane Sandy, I was really happy to know that the American Red Cross was one of the biggest supporters in helping the people in the East coast get back to their every day life.  Even though I didn't directly help the cause, I felt that this experience has allowed me to contribute more to such a cause than I ever could have.

That being said, this situation allowed me to tackle new challenges to directly help causes such as the effects of Hurricane Sandy.  I would love to be able to directly help one day (possibly through the American Red Cross because of my lovely experience with the people in the local chapter) and tack on another chapter in my life of helping others.

Hey I'm Julie Song
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