The Service Learning Volunteer Center is housed in the OSU Student Union and it strives to help OSU students and facility find a volunteer project that suites them.

I started this project a couple of months ago and met with the three interviewees: Katelyn Spencer, Cassandra Rodenbaugh and Nada Abd Elhadi. During this project, I found all the different perspectives of the interviews to be interesting. They all had different motivations and interests.

Cassandra had a passion for animals. She was a first year veterinary student, but she had all kinds of experience volunteering with animals. She worked at the eagle habitat near Stillwater,  Centro de Fauna de Vallcalent which is a animal rehabilitation center in Lleida, Spain, Tiny Paws kitten rescue, and all sorts of other places. As a first yet vet student, she still managed to find time to volunteer and I thought that set a powerful example for the rest of us.

Katelyn was a Masters student and a graduate assistant for the Volunteer Center. Her interests were focused on international trips and studies, as she wanted to teach English in these foreign counties. Most of her volunteering was done through an organization called Chi Alpha, which is a campus ministry, but they are known for their volunteering efforts, including helping students during move-in week, bringing Freshmen cookies during the first week of school, international mission trips and various other things throughout the semester.

Nada Abd Elhadi was an intern for the Volunteer Center, which let her be involved in a little bit of everything. She just had a huge heart for people and helping them with the right attitude. Her main project this semester was working in Primrose, which is an assisted living facility.

I think this project could have been a pretty overwhelming ordeal because of the amount of footage there was to go through, but we had a script lined out beforehand, which made it a lot easier in the editing phase.

I did a couple of things different with this project. Music is becoming a common attribute in my videos and at first I wasn’t too sure I would like it, but it seems to make a big difference, so it will probably be something I add to every video. I’ve done a lot of research about what makes an effective video and one of the most important things is a catchy intro. I used to create custom intros introduce the video, but with the first 10 to 15 seconds being what can make or break a video, I’ve decided to put them at the end instead, which leads to the concluding animation.

In a perfect world, you should put a sequence of 3 second video clips for the first 15 seconds of your video. It seems like a lot, but it will catch the attention of your viewers because they know they’re going to have to pay attention, so they don’t miss anything. Because of scheduling conflicts, I wasn’t able to get enough video for the variety of volunteer opportunities to accomplish this, but it’s something I will strive for in the future.

I like to make intros/outros to relate to theme of the organization its being made for. Memories and photographs seemed to play an important part in the volunteer experience, so I wanted to convey that. I made what looks like falling Polaroids with some of the benefits of volunteering written out for this video’s outro. It was one of the more difficult parts of this project, but I’m happy with the way it turned out.

Obviously I couldn’t get video for all the volunteer options, but the women had a lot of pictures of them having fun during their trips. I wanted to make sure those pictures were labeled, so if a potential volunteer saw the video and thought they would like to do something similar then they would know where to start or what organization to contact.

For more information about volunteering with the Service Learning Volunteer Center, check out their website, where you can find a list of places to volunteer, log your hours, or just check out the services they offer. Or if you live outside the area or aren’t a student or faculty, then check out their Facebook page to keep up with their news.