Biological science senior David Poirer poses with his Teach For America Build-A-Bear on Thursday in his apartment. Poirer received the complimentary bear after being accepted into Teach For America and assigned to a middle school in St. Louis, where Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc. is located.
It was 6 p.m. and David Poirier was waiting for an e-mail. He saw the subject line, dropped the phone and had to search for it before he could call his mom to tell her the good news. He had been accepted into Teach for America.
“I was so excited,” Poirier said. “Honestly, I didn’t really know if I’d get in.”
Poirier was one of 240 MSU students who sent an application to Teach for America this year, marking an increase of about 73 percent from the 139 applications received from MSU last year.
The boom in applications is not confined to Teach for America or MSU. It reflects a growing trend noted by service organizations including the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. The Peace Corps saw an 18 percent increase in applications, from 13,011 in 2008 to 15,386 in 2009. AmeriCorps saw an increase of at least 170 percent, from 91,399 in 2008 to 246,842 in 2009.
“(At MSU), I think it’s more students deciding, ‘Why shouldn’t I do this now? Who knows, maybe the economy will be better in two years when I get back,’” said Kelley Bishop, executive director of MSU Career Services and Placement. “I would hope students know doing these things does not take you off a longer path. It’s more like a detour.”
A call to service
Maryhelen Harper was sitting behind the counter at Big Ten Liquor reading Newsweek when a customer approached her and said he read the same magazine.
“Are you a doctor?” she asked him.
The customer, it turned out, was the executive director for Gateway Community Services, a shelter for youths. Harper, then a journalism senior unsure what was next for her, was intrigued by the shelter and took down his e-mail address.
Harper, who graduated in August, has been working for Gateway Community Services for the last seven months as an Ingham County AmeriCorps VISTA member. AmeriCorps VISTA is a national service organization that targets poverty.
“I thought I was kind of a deadbeat, taking the scenic route and working at this liquor store, but because I was working there, it kind of got me straight on the path I was supposed to join,” she said. “I’m sure that some people have service that does fit into their actual career path, but I think more often than not, your service can lead you to other directions you never thought to pursue.”
The theories behind the surge in applications vary: President Barack Obama’s call to service. Increased advertising by service organizations. The state of the economy.
“You hear a hundred different reasons for that,” said Emily Leahy, recruitment director for Teach for America’s Michigan Recruitment Team. “For Teach for America, and for people to be very successful at the process, it always comes back to them feeling personally compelled by the mission, because there’s so many different opportunities to serve. They feel compelled by the achievement gap and they want to be part of the solution.”
Poirier knows little about St. Louis. He’s never been there before. He knows the entire district is “pretty urban and lower-income.” And he knows he wants to be a great teacher to students who need him.
Graduates are starting to realize dedicating two years to service doesn’t mean a fork in the road to a career, Bishop said. Instead, they are looking at service as an opportunity that can enhance a résumé, he said.
“You can articulate the skills,” Bishop said. “To be resourceful, change people’s minds, be resilient — those are all things employers are looking for.”
Alex Cash, a 2009 MSU graduate, said she hopes her Peace Corps experience in Morocco will make potential employers see her as a valuable asset. She wanted to lead an unordinary life: do something different, set herself apart. She thought joining the Peace Corps would be a great start.
“I don’t believe that you have to just get a job and settle down right after college,” said Cash, who is serving in El Gara, Morocco, until 2011. “I believe there are other paths out there that are perfectly OK to explore.”
Making a difference
The way Brett Baker sees it, one bad day could steer his second-graders off the path toward college.
Support student media! Please consider donating to The State News and help fund the future of journalism.
“I could be nervous on a Sunday for a lesson coming up and I could be completely exhausted, but those students will still be there,” said Baker, a 2008 MSU graduate currently serving for Teach for America in Newark, N.J. “They want my ‘A’ game and they deserve my ‘A’ game, because without it, they won’t get to college.”
Baker said he was “spellbound” when he saw a Teach for America presentation during his sophomore year of college and learned of the inequity in American education. Two days after hearing the presentation, he changed his premedical major and decided to pursue teaching.
“You sit there and you’re just like, you know, ‘What can I do?’” he said. “And it really sounds weird and it sounds cliché and it’s not one of those, ‘I’m going to save the world,’ things, but it’s like, ‘What can I do in Eastern Michigan to impart the education I got in high school and middle school for students who aren’t getting that?’”
It’s not easy, Baker said. It’s a high-stress job, it can be frightening and it’s sometimes hard to tell people who have been teaching for 25 years that you want to try something different, he said. But he said he always remembers he’s teaching for his students, not for himself.
“You just can’t understand the impact of having a student in your class whose father was killed — and that happens anywhere, happens to any teacher,” Baker said. “But it compounds with, that student’s dad died the same week as someone’s parents losing their jobs, someone getting evicted. All the little things like, ‘What am I going to eat for dinner?’ becomes a trivial choice compared to, ‘Am I going to eat dinner?’”
Cash said she “bawled” when she sat down to fill out the paperwork for the Peace Corps. She was overwhelmed, the paperwork was difficult to understand and the fact she was leaving was becoming real. She has been in Morocco since September and said there are many times she asks herself why she chose to go. It’s difficult and frustrating and she misses the U.S., her friends and her family. But the “great moments” make the experience worth the sacrifice, she said.
“When I am standing on my roof right before sunset and looking at all the raw beauty around me, when the kids I teach English to can say the things that I have taught them without looking at their notes, when I get to be with my fellow volunteers to share experiences, relax and have fun,” she said. “I mean, it’s a honor being welcomed into someone else’s life and being able to see the world the way they see it, to see that there is not only one way to look at things.”
Coming home
Ty Lawson, an MSU Peace Corps recruiter and graduate student, returned in December 2004 from Malawi, which is known as the “warm heart of Africa” because of the welcoming spirit of its people. He has exchanged letters with his former students in Malawi and recently was contacted on Facebook by one of them, but said he has not kept in contact as well as he could have.
The hardest part of coming home was trying to explain the experience to people who weren’t willing to listen for longer than two minutes, Lawson said.
“If you can explain in under two minutes, people would listen, but that’s not realistic to do,” he said.
“At first, it was difficult to relate to people with what my experience was like. Most Americans have not seen crushing poverty and have not experienced living in a different culture.”
Lawson said the experience gave him a new perspective. He is building on some of the things he learned in Malawi in graduate school, he said.
And he hasn’t forgotten the people who were generous despite their extreme poverty, who made it hard to be homesick and treated him like family.
“If I went over to a friend’s house to just talk, they would put a chair down for me and start making food and make me stay for lunch or dinner,” Lawson said. “I sat down on a bus and asked someone what he was eating and he gave it to me. … When my students introduced themselves to my parents, they said, ‘Thank you for sharing your son. He is not just your son; he is our son too,’ and put their arms around me.”
To read about Cash’s experiences in Morocco, visit her blog at alexinmorocco.blogspot.com.
