>> I would recommend to any student that your campus is not an island, its part of a community
and probably the best thing that you can do is learn about the community that you're in.
See the issues that are going on, become someone who has a sense of place of where they are.
Really that's all I do when I was in [inaudible].
I learned about the community that my college was in.
I learned about the cities and things to its boarders.
I learned about issues that are going here and it made all the difference.
It opened up opportunities to me that I could see, so I started working
with non-profit organizations, I started volunteering places, I started e-mailing people
and asking if I could just shadow them when they was doing various things.
Not everyone will have a complete, pre-conceived goal that they want to do,
but I think the exploration is
such an incredibly important part whether it's non-academic exploration in the expansiveness
of someone's own culture of who they are when they are in college
because after all college is one of the only right of passage
that we have left in American society.
You know if you look at classical societies forced some,
not to perpetuate the noble savage aspect,
but if you look at indigenous cultures you have someone grow up and declare their place
in the particular group that they are in.
They go away from home, sometimes on a vision quest or something like that,
return, and declare their purpose.
Well college is kind of in modern manifestation and you should explore academically,
that's the purpose of an institution, they're taking someone in their freshman
or sophomore year, but that cultural expansion too that really makes a difference.