Blog 3 - FED

This past weekend I was again given the opportunity to volunteer for Filipino Empowerment Day. Filipino Empowerment Day is an event held at UC Berkeley for the purposes of educating middle school and high school students about higher education. The day mainly consists of various workshops that deal with the different things that a student in their position would go through in the road to getting to college; things such as extracurricular activities, personal statements and even what its like to be a college student. The event is completely student run with volunteers coming from various colleges in the area such as UCDavis, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford. Just like the past three years, I was a volunteer for the UCDavis group known as Bridge. Bridge serves as a means of outreaching to potential UCDavis students and also as a resource to help them stay in the higher education once they arrive. I’ve been a pretty active member of this group since first arriving here at UCDavis because I feel like the work they do is truly needed in today’s society.

While at FED, I spent the majority of time just helping with logistics by shepherding students between various workshops or just helping out whenever anyone needed a hand. Even though I decided to take a smaller role this year, in previous years I had spent time on student panels during which students would just ask questions about anything pertaining to the life of a student. I found that these panels were very beneficial to the students because they could ask the questions they wanted to directly from the source. I love helping out at these events because I feel that although I worked hard to get to college, I didn’t make it to where I am by myself and I want to do anything I can do to help another person achieve their educational goals.