Students win service award
By Heather Mangold
City
Editor
Three Purdue students were honored before members
of the Lafayette community for their excellence in community service
at the Greater Lafayette Volunteer Bureau's luncheon on Thursday.
Professor John Pomery presented Melinda Foley,
Eric Steiner and Erin Taylor as three of the finalists for the Richard
J. Wood Community Commitment Award, offered through the Indiana Campus
Compact.
"These people are wonderful examples of what students
can achieve," said Pomery. "They put an incredible amount of work to
help others and they are making the world a better place."
Taylor won the award last Thursday. As a junior
in the School of Consumer and Family Sciences, she founded the Purdue
chapter of College Mentors for Kids. "Volunteering is contagious," said
Taylor. "It gets in your blood."
Taylor is also the president of Student Assisting
Volunteer Efforts, an organization that helps college students become
active in volunteerism and community service.
Taylor said that some day she would like to start
a camp for under-privileged children in central Ind.
While Taylor was honored with the Richard J. Wood
Community Commitment Award, Steiner and Foley are great representatives
of Purdue as well, said Pomery.
Steiner, a senior in the School of Agriculture,
worked as a volunteer on the re-election campaign for Sen. Richard Lugar.
"It was neat to actually play a role in the democratic
process," said Steiner.
He said he is also passionate about the Lafayette
Adult Reading Academy, an organization that helps people learn and communicate
with the English language.
Steiner said that he could relate to people at
the academy because as a student who studied abroad, he knows what it
is like to feel frustrated because of cultural differences.
"When they can repeat everything they were supposed
to learn for that day, it's a great sense of joy for me."
Steiner has studied abroad in Honduras and Poland
and plans to travel to South Africa next fall for his studies.
In addition, he is the president of Purdue's Mortar
Board and assists a team for the Indiana Future Farmers of America.
He said he is looking into volunteering for the Peace Corps for two
years and would like to receive his master's degree in public policy
from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He would
also like to pursue a career in international governmental relations.
Steiner and Taylor are not alone in their efforts
for community service. Foley, a junior in the School of Science, founded
Los Manos at Washington Elementary school in Lafayette. The organization
gives young students the opportunity to learn about a different culture
every week.
Foley's interest began when she was required to
do community service for her Spanish class at Purdue. At that time she
tutored a boy from Mexico who was having trouble adapting to his new
school.
"I learned that he wasn't making any friends because
of cultural differences," said Foley.
Foley took action by founding the organization
in the highly Hispanic populated school. She is a science and biology
major and the vice president of Alpha Epsilon Delta, a pre-medical society.
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