During my freshman and sophomore years at Iowa State I participated in volunteer spring break trips through the University Honors Program. As a freshman I traveled to Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico. We spent the entire week working with a poor, rural school system to help them improve their school building by building on an addition. As a sophomore, I traveled to Punta Gorda, Belize. This time around I served as a peer leader, assisting the program coordinators with preparing students for the trip. In Belize we worked on multiple projects. We assisted in a riverside environment clean-up effort, building a new bathroom system for a local school, performing sustainable landscaping for a local small business, and improving a playground and park area. These trips are great examples of compassionate creativity because we chose to spend our spring break going out of our comfort zones to help others. During these trips we also discovered and applied our individual strengths.
