Sept. 8, 2004

Med Students Log 1,000 Hours of Community Service

Entire Incoming Class of 2008 Spends Day Helping at 12 DC Locations

By Richard Sheehe

Last year’s incoming class of medical students at GW adopted community service as a principle, exacting a pledge from students to visit schools, clinics and other places in the District to help with everything from tutoring to weeding flower beds. So what was the theme for this year’s crop of future doctors?

Roll up your sleeves and do the same.

Thanks to the mentorship role that second-year students are now playing for the class of 2008, community service will remain a prominent theme. To this end, a full day of the orientation schedule was devoted to a community service outing. All 165 members of the class of 2008 fanned out across the District to paint lockers, plant trees and generally clean up at 12 public schools.

“Our class had a real focus on community service, and we wanted to expose new students to this same idea,” said Sarah Hill, a second-year student who spent most of the summer working on this year’s orientation schedule for her incoming classmates.

“The whole idea of medicine is about helping other people, but incoming students still have so much to learn about medicine itself,” said Brian Rudolph, another second-year student working as a mentor for the class of 2008. “Community service is a way for new students to learn, right off the bat, the elements of teamwork and helping that will guide them in medicine.”

The spirit of community service obviously did not begin with the class of 2007; GW medical students have long been active in the community. What this class did was make it easier to get started. “It’s not that students are not willing or don’t want to help in the community,” said Rhonda Goldberg, associate dean for student affairs and education. “It’s a question of finding a project.”

The class of 2007 found a wealth of projects that this year’s incoming class will no doubt be able to build on. Indeed, the pledge among students last year was that each person complete at least four hours of community service. By year’s end, the class of 2007 had racked up 10 times that amount, with more than 10,000 total hours of community service performed at numerous projects in clinics, shelters, community centers and schools in the District. Some students even managed to do community service overseas.

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